


^ .4fc 







LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



TO GIPSYLAND 




A GIPSY SHEPHERD. 



TO GIPSYLAND 



WRITTEN BY 

ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL 

AUTHOR OF 
U PLAY IN PROVENCE," "OUR SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY," ETC. 



AND ILLUSTRATED BY 

JOSEPH PENNELL 




NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

1893 




Copyright, 1892, 1893, by 
The Century Co. 



"Br 

copy 2. 



THE DE VINNE PHESS. 



TO GIPSYLAND 



>^> 




TO GIPSYLAND 



I 



INTRODUCTION 



IT was from Philadelphia that I first wan- 
dered into gipsyland. In those days 
the town seemed so dull. Now that I have 
been many years away, I feel the charm of 
its prim streets lined with endless red brick, 
and white marble, and green shutters ; the 
charm of the fine colonial mansions long since 
forsaken by fashion ; the charm of the old 
churches with their little strip of green grave- 
yard, of the quiet meeting-houses overshad- 
owed by great trees where gray-shawled 
women Friends, their sweet faces looking 
mildly from plain bonnets, and men Friends, 



2 TO GIPSYLAND 

in broad -brimmed hats and plain coats, linger 
when meeting is out on First-Day morning. 
I feel it all now until my own city seems 
lovelier and more picturesque than many a 
world- famed town. But then I knew little 
else, and I wearied of it, as all good Phila- 
delphians do. I wanted something new, 
something strange, something different to 
give it the touch of romance which I be- 
lieved it lacked so sadly. And this ro- 
mance I thought I found in the gipsies. I 
was young : in my eyes they brought with 
them all the glamour of the East, all the 
mystery of the unknown. 

We used to go and see them, the Rye and 
I, when we knew their tents were pitched in 
pretty woodland or shady field near the city. 
The Rye is my uncle, Hans Breitmann, Mr. 
Leland, whom all the Romanies know. His 
gipsy lore was great ; mine, gleaned from 
him, was infinitely less; but I do not think he 
ever loved the Romany better than I. If 
the gipsy has cast his spell over many a wise 
man, — over a Borrow in England, an arch- 
duke in Austria, a Hermann in Hungary, — 
why should I be ashamed to say that, in the 
years so long past, the curl of the white 



o 

H-l 

CO 

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INTRODUCTION 5 

smoke among the trees could set my heart to 
beating, that the first glimpse of the gay 
green van, with the pillows, white and ruffled, 
hanofinof from the window, could thrill me 
with joy ? Have I not said I was young when 
I first wandered into gipsyland ? 

Often J was with us when we went 

gipsying ; indeed, he too was greeted as a 
friend by every traveler on the road to whom 
he wished "Sarshan!" — the mystic password 
of these freemasons from the home of strange 
secret brotherhoods. 

When the first sweet days of spring came, 
and blossoming fruit-trees lit up many a trim 
side-yard, and wistaria trailed in purple glory 
over the second-story veranda, and the smell 
of the ailantus was strong in the streets, 
and sparrows were busy eating up the mea- 
suring-worms, then we would walk far out 
Broad street, through the dripping dark- 
ness of the public buildings, past the Ma- 
sonic Temple and the Academy of Fine 
Arts, past the big, pretentious houses of the 
rich up-town people, to where a bit of mea- 
dow-land between the built-up squares showed 
that we were well in the suburbs. For it 
was then that, in Oakdale Park, just behind 



6 TO GIPSYLAND 

the Rising Sun but shut in by hedge and 
trees, the Costelloes, traveling northward 
after their winter in Florida, pitched their 
tents. And nowhere, from one end of Phila- 
delphia to the other, were we more welcome 
than under this brown canvas roof, where, 
sitting on the carpeted ground, they brought 
us beer in a watering-pot, and poured it into 
silver mugs, each marked with different in- 
itials, and gave us the gossip of the roads, 
while the dogs and babies tumbled in the 
long grass outside, and the pet goat strayed 
into the tent to rub himself against the old 
man, and the horses browsed under the apple- 
trees. 

But in the autumn, when the wind blew 
cold and fresh, and the country was aflame 
with scarlet and gold, and brilliant chrysan- 
themums and scarlet sage filled the borders 
of our grass-plots with their wealth of color, 
it was over to Camden we went, out to the 
reservoir beyond the town, where Davy 
Wharton and the Boswells had their camp. 
And of all, this, as I look back, is the gipsy 
tramp I like the best. For sometimes we 
would walk down Spruce street, silent and 
asleep at all hours ; by the old Pennsylvania 



INTRODUCTION 7 

Hospital, getting one glimpse into its gar- 
den, lovelier and quainter, it seems to me 
now, than any I have seen in England ; 
and then up Seventh street to Washington 
Square, where a few gray-haired men shared 
the seats under the trees with the nurses 
and children ; across Independence Square ; 
through Independence Hall ; and so, on 
along the noisiest business streets to Mar- 
ket, and the Camden Ferry. Or else, we 
would go at once over to Chestnut street, at 
the hour when it was gay with shoppers and 
sunshine, when we knew we would always 
meet first George Boker, — Philadelphia's only 
poet, as he called himself, — white-haired, 
white-mustachioed, distinguished and hand- 
some ; George W. Childs, walking home with 
"Tony' Drexel, between them the inevitable 
stray prince, or author, or clergyman from 
England. And whichever way we took, as 
likely as not, we found Walt Whitman at the 
ferry, or sitting in his favorite big chair by 
the fruit-stand at the foot of Market street, 
or just getting out of the street-car. He al- 
ways had a friendly greeting for us, a friendly 
word about the travelers who made their au- 
tumn home so near his. I can never think 



8 TO GIPSYLAND 

of idle Davy Wharton or pretty Susie Bos- 
well, lounging on the sunlit grass, without 
seeing the familiar figure of the good gray 
poet, leaning on his stick, his long white 
beard hiding and showing the loose open 
shirt, his soft gray felt hat shading the kindly 
eyes. 

Now and then, in the crowded street, we 
caught the gleam of the gipsy smile ; now 
and then, in country walks, we came suddenly 
upon a tent by the wayside, and these chance 
meetings had all the delight of the unexpected. 
And there were great occasions when we left 
Philadelphia far behind, and went down to a 
country fair in some New Jersey town. It 
was on one of these, I remember, that I was 
first introduced to the Lovells. 

I thought nothing could be more enchant- 
ing than the life these people led, wandering 
at will from the pine forests of Maine to the 
orange groves of the far south; pitching their 
tents now in blossoming orchard, now under 
burning maple; sleeping and fiddling and 
smoking away their days while the rest of 
the world toiled and labored in misery and 
hunger. But if I said this to the Rye, he 
would laugh and wish that I could see the 



INTRODUCTION 9 

Hungarian gipsies. They were wilder and 
freer, and all the strange beauty and poetry 
of their lives they put into their music when 
they played. There was magic in it. 

One memorable day in Chestnut street — 
it was Sunday morning, and the stores were 
shut, and the street-cars without their bells 
rattled down at longer intervals, and every 
one, in Sunday clothes, was walking home 
from church or meeting — we met three of 
the wildest, most beautiful creatures I had 
ever imagined. They were tall and lithe 
and muscular, and their dark faces, with the 
small, delicate, regular features, were lovely as 
those that look out from many an old Flor- 
entine picture of Christ and the saints. 
Their hair hung in black curls to their 
shoulders, they wore high black sheepskin 
caps, a row of silver buttons adorned their 
short blue jackets, and they carried large 
bags of coarse canvas. They seemed as out 
of place in our proper Chestnut street as 
ghosts at mid-day. The Rye stopped and 
spoke to them. They were gipsies from 
Hungary, and a light came into their eyes 
and they showed their pretty white teeth at 
the first word of Romany. But at once a 



io TO GIPSYLAND 

crowd of idlers gathered. "Who are they? 
what are they? what do they say?" we were 
asked on every side. It was unbearable, and 
with a grasp of their hands we let them go. 

This was the beginning of it. After meet- 
ing the real gipsy I felt that I never could be 
content until I had gone to the real gipsy- 
land — to Hungary, where 

Free is the bird in the air, 
And the fish where the river flows ; 
Free is the deer in the forest, 
And the gipsy wherever he goes. 

Hurrah ! 
And the gipsy wherever he goes. 

When next I sat with the Costelloes in the 
tent at Oakdale Park, when next I gossiped 
with Davy Wharton in the woods near the 
Camden reservoir, I thought that something — 
I could hardly say what — had gone from them 
forever. 

A year later, when summer came, the Rye 
went northward, where, in scented pine 
woods, within sound of the sea, he spent 
long hours in Indian wigwams while Towah 
told him tales of Gloscap and his wicked 
brother. But I was in Chestnut Hill, with 



INTRODUCTION u 

nothing more exciting to listen to than the 
song of the crickets through the warm even- 
ing in our garden, sweet with roses and 
honeysuckle. 

And then it was that, one morning, I saw 
in the "Ledger's" column of advertisements 
that Hungarian gipsies were to play at the 
Mannerchor, the up-town beer-garden, where 
no self-respecting Philadelphian living within 
the correct radius of the old rhyme of the 
streets, 

Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, and Pine, 

would willingly be seen. To go there was 
considered "fast" in those days; but it was 
nothing to me where the gipsies were to be 
found; that they were to play was all I cared 
to know. 



II 



THE July night was warm and close when 
Ned — my brother — and I took an early 
evening train for the Mannerchor. A faint 
breeze was blowing over the fields to the pi- 
azza of the old farm-house where my family sat 
fanning and rocking themselves in the fad- 
ing light. But there was not a breath of air 
to cool the stifling Ninth and Green street 
depot, not a breath to stir in the trees of the 
near garden. Glaring gas-jets parched the 
leaves on the lowest branches, and threw hot 
reflections on the tiny grass-plots between 
the narrow gravel walks, and on the plants 
in tubs, which strove with pathetic failure to 
imitate the real country, as I then thought, 
but which now seem to me a very fair copy 
of the beer-gardens of the Fatherland. 

13 



14 TO GIPSYLAND 

When Ned and I first passed through the 
turnstile, no one as yet sat at the little tables 
ranged in order under the trees ; no one was 
in the great shell-shaped band-stand at the 
far end, where lights blazed brightest and 
hottest. It was not much more than half- 
past seven ; the gipsy concert did not begin 
until eiodit. 

The waiters, idling where shadows made 
the garden least hot, looked at us, the first- 
comers, with lazy curiosity as we walked 
over to a table close to the music-stand. 
Presently two or three dark men lounged out 
from the house. They wore no sheepskin 
caps or silver buttons, their hair was un- 
curled, but I knew them. They were darker, 
swarthier than Seth Lovell or Davy Whar- 
ton, and I saw the gipsy in their eyes and 
in their every feature. 

The hands of the clock over the door 
pointed to ten minutes to eight ; the waiters 
had roused themselves at last, and were rush- 
ing past us with glasses of beer ; the German 
patrons of the garden were fast filling the 
chairs around the little tables. Then some 
one brought a big bass viol and turned up 



TO GIPSYLAND 15 

the lights still higher in the stand. There 
was no time to lose. Had not the Rye, had 
not every book I had read about them, told 
me that half the pleasure in the music of the 
Hungarian gipsies was in their playing for 
you alone, "into the ear," as the saying is? 
And I was eager that on this, their first 
night in Philadelphia, their music should be 
for me : they must know me as a gipsy sister, 
and not as a mere stranger like the Germans 
who were already busy with their pipes and 
beer. 

"Do go and speak to them," I said to Ned. 

The next minute he was addressing them 
politely in his most fluent Ollendorf: "I wish 
with the gipsies to speak." 

But they shook their heads, smiled, and 
shrugged their shoulders. He took one by 
the hand, and drew him to where I sat. The 
others followed. 

" Rakessa tu Romanis?" (which is good 
gipsy for, "Do you speak Romany?") I 
asked breathlessly. 

They looked puzzled ; they half under- 
stood, but though the words had a familiar 
sound, they could not quite make them out. 



16 TO GIPSYLAND 

When they spoke, it was the same with me. 
Three or four others of the dark- faced men 
sauntered up and surrounded us. Five min- 
utes to eight ; what was to be done ? 

" Rakessa tu Romdnisf I repeated in 
despair. 

They were now as eager as I. Suddenly 
a youth, with wild eyes and wilder hair, 
raised his left hand close to my face, and with 
his right pointed to each finger in turn. 
Was it inspiration ? " Yeck, dui, trin " (" One, 
two, three"), I began. 

It was enough. A dozen hands were 
stretched out to shake mine. White teeth 
glistened, dark eyes flashed. Torrents of 
unintelligible welcome were poured upon me. 
Yes : this was far better than the gossip in 
Oakdale Park, than the afternoon greeting 
by Camden reservoir. 

But it was time for them to go. First they 
led me to the table that faced the band-stand, 
while the Germans under the near trees 
stared, and even the waiters stopped with 
their trays to look in puzzled amazement. 
In the hot glare of the gas-lights the 
gipsies took their seats and lifted up their 
violins. The leader stood in front with 



TO GIPSYLAND 17 

bow raised. He looked to me and bowed ; 
the eyes of all his musicians were fixed 
upon my face. 

It began. I did not know then, as I do now, 
that it was a Czardas they played. I only 
felt — felt the fierce passion and unutterable 
sadness, the love and rage in the voice of 
violin and cymbal. In it was all the gipsy 
beauty, all the gipsy madness I had ever 
dreamed, and more. And the music swept 
through me until I lived again whatever 
sorrow and gladness had come into my life. 
It is easier to let one's self go when one is 
young, when one has one's own romance to 
kindle the blood and warm the heart. All 
around me stolid Germans were drinking 
beer ; occasional groups of young men from 
the sacred quarter, with the consciousness of 
evil in their smiles, were sucking sherry-cob- 
blers and mint-juleps through long straws ; 
glasses rattled, and now and then the bells of 
passing horse-cars jingled in the street be- 
yond. But what matter? There was the 
starlit sky above, the trees hid the near 
houses, the dingy beer-garden was glorified 
by music divine and passionate, which was 
all for me alone. Is it any wonder that I lost 



18 TO GIPSYLAND 

my head a little as I sat there in the warm 
summer night with the wail and rapture of 
the Czardas sweet in my ears ? 

And yet it was only the ordinary band 
that one hears in every town of Hungary: 
a cymbal, a flageolet, half a dozen violins, a 
bass viol, and a cello. They played without 
notes, and the leader, really the first violin, 
now faced his audience, now turned to his 
musicians, first to one, then to the other, 
sometimes merely swaying his body, again 
fairly dancing in time. 

When the gipsies left the band-stand they 
came to where I sat, while all the Germans 
stared the harder. They saw the pleasure 
in my eyes, and they were glad. I could 
talk fast enough with the English gipsies; as 
well as they, could I make my jest at the 
gorgio — the silly Gentile — standing by. But 
now I learnt to my cost that the Hungarian 
Romany has a fair show of grammar and 
construction, while my English friends had 
none. But every Romany word I said was 
hailed with joy and was a new bond of 
friendship. To table and chair, to violin and 
tree they pointed; its Romany name, as I 
said it, was an open sesame to their hearts. 



M 
W 




TO GIPSYLAND 21 

Then one spoke atrocious French; another 
better German. It was the youth with the 
wild eyes and hair who knew the language 
hated of the Hungarian, and, because of the 
strength of his desire to talk with me, he 
understood my halting phrases. 

Did they take me for a Romany? I think 
not. The gipsy knows his people too well. 
There is in him a mystery never yet fath- 
omed by the gorgio, the Gentile. He, like 
the freemasons, has a mystic sign by which 
he recognizes his own. But, sensitive as 
they are, they felt that I was their friend. 
The leader, as if to give me formal recog- 
nition, brought his wife, who was travel- 
ing with him, to sit at my side; and then, 
with the grace which is half the gipsy's 
charm, and after the pleasant custom of 
Hungary, — like the music, it was new to 
me then; I understand it better now, — he 
sent for beer, and, standing about my table, 
they clinked glasses with me and with Ned, 
and solemnly pledged their friendship and 
good fellowship. And now, how the Ger- 
mans stared! 

The gipsy music was an uncertain experi- 
ment in Philadelphia, where life, like the 



22 TO GIPSYLAND 

streets, is ordered in straight lines. To avoid 
failure that first evening, Karl Sentz's or- 
chestra came and took their places in the 
band-stand after the first interval. The 
gipsies stayed with me while ordinary 
waltzes and overtures were played in the 
ordinary way, and the Germans placidly 
puffed at their pipes and drank their beer. 
As Levy blew himself red in the face over 
his cornet, the youth with the wild eyes and 
hair — Rudi, he told me his name was — 
leaned close to my chair and whispered in 
slow German: "They play from notes, these 
men; but we — we play from our hearts!" 
This is the difference ; for the gipsy is not 
the wanderer, that hath no hope, of the Rou- 
manian ballad, singing 

Without a heart to suffer what he sings. 

He has a heart when he plays ; that is why, 
if you too have one, it beats in answer. 

Well, they played again, and again it was 
for me alone. One Czardas after another 
filled this quiet Philadelphia corner with un- 
accustomed tears and laughter woven into 
sweet, strange sounds. The longer they 
played, the more intense was their joy in 



TO GIPSYLAND 23 

it — their black eyes glowed, their cheeks 
were aflame ; when the frenzy seized them, 
they shouted with their violins, and then 
their voices were hushed as the sudden wild, 
low wail stilled their glad ecstasy. In the 
end they were as men drunk with music. 
To their feet they sprang as they fairly beat 
out of violins and cymbal the fierce, stirring 
summons of the Rakotzy. 

But scarce had the last note been struck 
when Rudi, eyes like burning coals, was at 
my side. • 

" Come," he said, and he took my hand, 
and we ran through the garden, Ned at my 
heels, — the Germans dragging their heads 
out of their Kriigels to look, — through the 
bar, through a passageway to a long hall 
with a row of closets on either side. 

He left without a word. But in a second 
he was dancing back, waving over his head 
a pair of high boots, and, as if they were 
a tender offering, placed them at my feet. 
Again he was gone, again he was pirouetting 
back, red breeches flying aloft flagwise ; a 
third time, and a blue coat swung in the air 
and was lowered with the tributes before me. 
Earlier in the evening, remembering those 



24 TO GIPSYLAND 

beautiful wild creatures in Chestnut street 
and their silver buttons and sheepskin caps, I 
had asked if he had no special costume : this 
was the uniform which the Hungarian gipsy 
wears always abroad, never at home, except 
when he serves as conscript. 

The others had followed fast behind, and 
gathered close about me. The fever of the 
Rakotzy was still in their faces, still coursed 
through their veins. They shook my hand 
again, they patted me on the shoulder, they 
laughed aloud. And I laughed with them ; 
my hand went out to meet theirs in a warm, 
hearty grasp as I said good night ; for at 
Ninth and Green a train w r aited — the last 
that night to Chestnut Hill. But the won- 
der of the music stayed with me as the cars 
steamed out Ninth street, even while the 
men coming home from their evening in 
town snored serenely in their seats, and 
the conductor, who knew them all but too 
well, rudely shook each in turn as his station 
was reached ; it lent a new loveliness to the 
wide dew-drenched meadows, dim and shad- 
owy in the starlight, as I saw them now from 
the window, to the silent, deserted lanes of 
Chestnut Hill, when I walked back to the old 



TO GIPSYLAND 25 

house and the garden, the cool air full of 
the scent of honeysuckles and roses, and the 
crickets still chanting. It was the gipsies 
who had given this new, rare beauty to the 
summer night, and yet, as I lingered on the 
piazza among the flowers, too excited to go 
to bed, it was not of them I was dreaming ! 

This was but the beginning of a long sum- 
mer of music and beauty. Week after week 
the gipsies played in the Mannerchor Garden, 
and night after night I turned my back upon 
Chestnut Hill, just as the afterglow began to 
fade, and the first stars came out, and the 
wind blew fresh and pure over the meadows, 
to go in the hot cars to the hotter town, and 
then to sit in the glare of many lights, breath- 
ing rank tobacco-laden air among the beer- 
drinkers in the little garden which was a 
Paradise to me once the gipsies played. 
Their concerts, strangely enough, proved a 
success. There was soon no need for Karl 
Sentz's orchestra to divide the evening with 
them. All Philadelphia, from down-town, 
from up-town, from the suburbs, came to 
crowd the Mannerchor. Perhaps a few really 
cared ; more likely lights and movement 
and gaiety helped them to forget the heat 



26 TO GIPSYLAND 

better than darkened parlors and lonely 
porches. It was a chance. Another season, 
another year, their violins might have sung, 
their cymbal been beaten in vain. But the 
summer was dull ; they appeared at the right 
moment ; they were made the fashion. Their 
blue coats and red breeches were seen at 
many a correct Germantown garden-party ; 
proper young ladies strummed the Rakotzy 
on their pianos; large parties from 

Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, and Pine 

spent the evening at the Mannerchor, and 
their numbers saved their reputations. 

But it was always for me the gipsies 
waited, always for me they reserved the table 
facing their stand, always for me their violins 
and cymbal sang. I met them no longer 
merely as " the gipsies." Each had his dis- 
tinct individuality. Of the half-dozen Sandors 
among them, there was first the leader, hand- 
some, graceful, but growing too plump with 
Philadelphia prosperity : at a month's end his 
fine blue coat scarce met over his portly 
stomach. And there was Herr Josef, who 
played the cymbal, whose fingers flashed with 
opals and diamonds, who wore velvet when 



TO GIPSYLAND 27 

the others went clad in cloth, and who spoke 
a weird tongue he called French. And 
Rudi, — I think I knew him best, he was so 
enthusiastic in his friendship ; he was never 
from my side when he was not playing, and 
he was learning an English that rivaled Herr 
Josef's French : " Goot eefnin ! I lof you ! 
ferry veil ! 'ow de do ! ' was his stock in 
trade. Then there was the large man who 
played the bass viol, and who said nothing 
but chuckled loud when he patted me on the 
shoulder : he was father of the little fellow, 
the pretty parody of his elders in his red 
breeches and high boots. Another, but a few 
years older, was beautiful as the youths in 
Del Sarto's pictures : St. John we called him. 
The cello-player never spoke to me ; a deep 
scar marked his cheek, and sometimes he 
would lean his face close to his cello and 
whisper to it, and I thought there was mys- 
tery in his silence. Near him sat a small 
man with pathetic eyes, which seldom left my 
face, and he was as shy as the flageolet- 
player was fearless in his tender pantomime. 
And last, the thin tall gipsy like a mulatto, 
who, one evening, with much solemnity, gave 
me his photograph and a letter. It was in 



28 TO GIPSYLAND 

Hungarian ; I could not read it ; I was afraid 
to try to find some one who could. For my 
answer he still waits. 

July passed and August came. At the 
Mannerchor the gipsies had been engaged for 
one month only. But Philadelphians had not 
yet tired of them, and they went to the park 
to play, to Belmont Mansion. 

To Belmont I followed. It was further from 
Chestnut Hill. But in the August afternoon 
it was pleasant in the park and on the river 
in the little steamboat, starting just as shells 
and skiffs and canoes were launched from the 
row of pretty boat-houses on the banks. 
Some evenings Ned was with me ; on others 

it was with J (who already knew his way 

as well as I to the tents of the Costelloes and 
the Whartons) that I walked up the cool 
glen to Belmont Hill. I liked to sit there as 
the evening grew fresher, looking to where 
the river, in shadow, went wandering toward 
the million eyes of Philadelphia's " magnifi- 
cent mediocrity " blazing in the hot glare of 
the sunset. People were dining in the man- 
sion, and on the wide porch ; others were 
drinking beer at the little tables on the lawn ; 
and when the sun had set and faint lights 



TO GIPSYLAND 29 

glimmered here and there on the water 
below, or floated upward on passing barge or 
boat, and bicycle-lamps, like fireflies, flitted by 
in the valley, the gipsies played. 

Their music seemed more impassioned and 
wilder here in the open night. The voice of 
nature and freedom, what had it to do with 
stuffy halls and close town gardens ? 

I consumed the deep green forest, 
With all its songs: 
And now the songs of the forest 
All sing aloud in me. 

All the storms and the sunshine through 
which they and their fathers had wandered 
sang aloud in the Czardas that now went wail- 
ing and sighing, rejoicing and exulting, over 
the hillside down the glen. They were con- 
scious, I think, of the difference. Their vio- 
lins grew more plaintive, fiercer. They 
could scarce tear themselves from the music ; 
again and again when the last note was 
struck, their bows would sweep the strings 
anew, and the cymbal beat a new summons, 
and they were once more whirling in the 
dance, or weeping their hearts away. There 
was magic now in their playing to hold the 



30 TO GIPSYLAND 

most indifferent, to wake tears and laughter 
at will. 

They waited for me at Belmont as they 
had in the Mannerchor ; they came and sat 
with me during the short intervals ; and 
sometimes we walked homeward together 
through the dark, silent park. We grew 
friendlier in those long walks. It was the 
hour and the place for confidence, and then 
they would talk of the broad Hungarian plain 
and the wild Karpathian valleys they loved; 
of the vintage on the sunny hillsides and the 
dance in the white road. And it was then, 
too, that Rudi first spoke of his sweetheart in 
Hungary : Marie was her name. He took 
her photograph from his pocket. Sandor 
struck a match on his red breeches, and I 
had a glimpse of a young face framed in 
great masses of hair. The little flame flick- 
ered and died. " Marie ! Marie ! ' cried 
Rudi in the starlight, and his voice was sweet 
as his violin. 

During another of these long walks, Rudi 
said they wanted me to come the next even- 
ing, when they would play as they never 
had before ; I had not heard yet all their 
violins could tell. They were going from 



TO GIPSYLAND 



31 



Philadelphia in a week now. Yes, it made 
them sad. Not for many months could 
they turn their faces toward the Hungarian 
plain, and Marie, and the "deep green for- 
ests." They must play first in other Ameri- 
can towns, and it would be lonely for them 
when I was not near. Would I come ? 
Would I listen? 

There was but one answer to make as we 
walked together under the stars, with the last 
passionate cry of the Czardas still ringing in 
my ears. I was infatuated with the gipsies, 
my friends told me in reproach. Perhaps I 
was. 

They went back to the Mannerchor for 
their last week. It was near the shell- 
shaped band-stand, in among the plants in 
tubs, where we had first met, that they were 

waiting when J and 

I passed through the turn- 
stile. The leader, with un- 
wonted ceremony, stepped 
forward to greet me and 
lead the way to the table 
they called mine. His 
wife was sitting there. 

I knew them so well 




A HUNGARIAN ROMANY. 



32 TO GIPSYLAND 

now that before they spoke I was conscious 
of their unusual excitement. When they 
spoke it was with strangely boisterous gaiety; 
their eyes shone with a new light ; there 
was triumph in their smiles. The little soft- 
eyed man for the first time wished me 
" Latcho ratti" while Rudi, speechless, danced 
about my chair. The gipsy with the scar 
was as gay as were the others. 

What did it mean ? I cannot explain why 
I was uneasy. I was not afraid, not distrust- 
ful. And yet, instinctively, I wished that I 
had not come. The evening would not pass 
as had the many I had spent dreaming my 
own dreams, my thoughts far away in other 
gardens, on other hillsides, while I listened 
to their music: of this I was sure before I 
had been with them ten minutes. And when 
they played ? Rudi was right. Never before 
had I heard all that violins and cymbal could 
tell. 

Their music was entirely Hungarian. One 
Czardas after another quickened into frenzy 
in the warm, still night, while the waiters 
rushed in and out among the tables, and the 
Germans drank deep and long from their 
beer-mugs. But now the wail of sorrow was 



TO GIPSYLAND 33 

at once silenced by a paean of joy. They 
came to me again during the first interval, 
and the Czardas had not quieted them. The 
leader sent for a bottle of Hungarian wine. 
Was it that, and not the music, which had 
gone to their heads ? I stilled the suspicion 
as disloyal even before it took definite shape. 
Indeed, had theirs been ordinary intoxication 
it would have troubled me less. There was 
something far more alarming in the solem- 
nity with which the leader filled the glasses, 
and all, clinking mine, drank to me in the 
wine of their country, and cried aloud their 
"Servusf Viva! Eljen!" 

I grew more uneasy at these uncanny 
sounds, which I have since learned are harm- 
less. Even as they drank, I determined to 
leave the garden as soon as the gipsies re- 
turned to the band-stand, and not to wait 
for the last friendly farewell after the Rakotzy 
had beaten a dismissal. Again they played 
a Czardas, all fire and passion. 

But I rose to go. Without seeing, I knew 
that their eyes followed my every movement. 
" Latcho ratti! r I said to the leader's wife, 
who could speak but Hungarian. 

Sitting with her were two fellow-country- 



34 TO GIPSYLAND 

men, not gipsies, whom she had met for the 
first time that night. She was talking with 
them, and at my "good night" turned in 
surprise. She took both my hands, and 
forced me into my chair. 

I told her in English, though I knew she 
could not understand, that I must catch a 
train, that I could not wait. And I strug- 
gled to get up. She protested almost with 
tears. She held my hands tight, she looked 
to Sandor, she half rose, hesitated, and then 
suddenly spoke to the Hungarians at her 
side, while all the while the gipsies watched 
and played a remonstrance. One of the 
Hungarians lifted his hat: "She begs you 
not to go," he said. 

"Tell her, please, that I have a train to 
catch." 

There was despair in her face, and she 
clung to my hands. Again he translated: 
"She says Sandor has something of impor- 
tance to talk to you about. You cannot go." 

"But I must! I must!" I cried. The more 
she insisted, the more eager was I to be 
gone, — not to hear that something Sandor 
had to say. I could not draw my hands 
from hers, and again she spoke to her inter- 



TO GIPSYLAND 35 

preter, fast and earnestly, never once looking 
from me. There was a twinkle in his eye, 
but he said gravely and respectfully: 

"Madam, she implores that you stay. San- 
dor to-night will ask for your hand in mar- 
riage for his brother. He is wealthy. He 
plays well. He will take you to many lands, 
to his beautiful Hungary. You will be rich, 
you will have the gipsy music with you 
always." 

This then was what it meant. I had been 
living my own romance in their music; they 
had been making one for me. 

"It 's impossible," I said. "I must catch 
my train. It 's all a dreadful mistake. I 
cannot stay another minute. I 'm so sorry!" 

And I wrenched my hands from hers. 
Without a look at the band-stand, though I 
felt all their eyes upon me and trembled at 
the madness of the Czardas, I fled from the 
garden and the gipsies, to Ninth and Green 
streets, through the depot, into the cars. 
The train had not started before I regretted 
my flight. Was ever yet woman's curiosity 
put to so cruel a test? I had a lover among 
the gipsies; so much I knew. But which 
one of these swarthy men was Sandor's 



36 TO GIPSYLAND 

brother, and, indeed, which Sandor was it 
who had a brother? Rudi loved the dark- 
eyed Marie in his Karpathian home, but 
then one or two more wives to a Hunsfa- 
rian gipsy would be no great matter. Herr 
Josef, with the flashing opals and the velvet 
coat, seemed the Croesus of the band. Was 
it he whom I had refused with such reckless 
incoherence ? Or was it the bi^ bass-viol 
player who wanted a new mother for his 
boy? Or the flageolet-player, the full ten- 
derness of whose pantomine I had not 
grasped? Or that soft-eyed, shy creature, or 
the mysterious one with the scarred cheek ? 
I could not £o back and ask. Never now 
would I know the lover with whom I might 
have wandered from land to land, at whose 
side, under the starlit skies of Hungary, I 
might forever have listened to the gipsy 
music. 

Naturally, from that day forward I was 
full of a longing for Hungary. Within a 
week the gipsies had gone to a far western 
city ; the Mannerchor was left once more to 
up-town Germans, and nobody who was any- 
body was willingly seen there again. But 



TO GIPSYLAND 37 

even if the young lady across the turnpike 
had not strummed the Rakotzy on her piano 
from morning till night, I could not easily 
have got the gipsies out of my head. 

Who has not been foolish once, and the 
better for his folly ? I began to dream of 
Hungary as a sort of earthly paradise, where 
the real gipsy, with long black hair curling 
to his shoulder, and silver buttons on his 
coat, wandered, violin in hand, through the 
cool wood and over the vine-clad hillside, or 
sometimes into the towns, above all to Buda- 
pest, which in my fancy was an enchanted 
city of the East, with domes and minarets, 
with marble terraces and moonlit waters — a 
Venetian Cairo on the Ganges. It was a 
trifle romantic and silly, I admit. But in 
our time, we have all, like Stevenson's lan- 
tern-bearers, carried our farthing dip, and ex- 
ulted as if it were a ten-thousand-candle- 
power electric light. 

Not at once did my chance come to jour- 
ney, in search of this real gipsy, to the land 
where my unknown lover so gladly would 
have taken me. He and his brother Sandor 
returned no more to Philadelphia. The next 
winter another gipsy band gave a few con- 



3* 



38 



TO GIPSYLAND 



certs in town and in the suburbs. They had 
passed through Boston, however, and there 
was culture in their Czardas ; besides, they 




THE BELLE OF THE CAMP. 



played in the Academy of Music on the stage, 
while I sat, one of many, in the parquet, and 
the music was not for me. 

Soon after this J went abroad. One 

day from him came a letter telling me how 
in Paris he had gone to the Eden Theater, 
and there in the foyer he had heard that low, 



TO GIPSYLAND 39 

sweet wailing to which together we had lis- 
tened many a summer night at the Man- 
nerchor, and had seen the Romany faces, the 
red breeches, and the blue coats. They were 
very like our friends, and for the sake of old 
times he had gone up and said " Late ho div- 
vus Prali!' and they had kissed him, and 
welcomed him as a brother, and played for 
him alone, until he once more looked upon 
the lights blazing in the shell-shaped band- 
stand, and heard the cry of " zwei bier" under 
the withering trees, and the jangling of the 
street-car bells up Eighth street. It made 
me homesick, as I read, for the Hungary I 
had never seen — for the Hungary I was not 
to see until I had lived through a strange 
little gipsy interlude at home. 



Ill 



IT was in the greenest growth of the May- 
time, and late in the afternoon, when 

J and I started for the gipsy camp, just 

outside West Philadelphia. In three weeks' 
time we should have to go on a wedding- 
journey, and we had decided to take to the 
road with the gipsies. Our freedom would 
begin where that of most men and women 
ceases. We too should become free as the 
bird in the air, as the deer in the forest, for 
we would follow the gipsy wherever he goes. 
We were certain there was an encampment 
near the old place by the wood ; the rumor 
had been spread abroad, and had come out in 
the "Ledger" as a warning to West Phila- 
delphians to keep their back gates bolted. 
Whether it was composed of old and tried 

41 



42 TO GIPSYLAND 

acquaintances, or of a new, and therefore 
questionable, lot, we had now come out to see. 

When we reached the camp we found two 
wagons drawn up, their doors thrown open, 
showing the gorgeous ruffled pillow-cases 
within. Gay-colored blankets and counter- 
panes hung over the neighboring bushes. 
One good-sized tent was pitched in the wood, 
and close by, on freshly strewn boughs, two 
women were sitting, meditatively chewing long 
straws. In front of them, as usual, was a 
small crowd. As we drew nearer we recog- 
nized the older of the two women. It was 
Rhody Lovell, whom of all our friends we 
were most glad to meet just then. 

Rhody, when not in a temper, is kind and 
friendly, and then she has excellent manners, 
and at least makes a show of cleanliness. 
There was a gleam of pleasure in her red- 
ringed eyes when she looked up and smiled 
in answer to our " Sarshan." 

"Well, now, it 's glad I am to see you 
both. Many 's the time I 've thought of you. 
It 's a poor seat I can give you, but won't 
you rest awhile in the wood ? And can I get 
habben (dinner) for you ? No ? You Ve had 
yours ? Well, then, a cup of tea ? No ? Well, 



TO GIPSYLAND 



43 



then, besh alay and lei a bitti rakkerben (sit 
down and have a little talk). You see," she 
continued, with a wave of her hand to the 
staring gorgios, "here is a young lady and 




"AULD MON LOVELL." 



gentleman as is n't ashamed to be seen sittin' 
along of us. Many 's the dollar I 've made 
out of 'em, and it 's many more I 'm going to 
make. For it 's a nice beautiful new fortune 
I 've to tell you, my dears ! " 

"You have deserved the money," I said, 



44 TO GIPSYLAND 

" for nobody 's told me more about the good 
luck that 's coming than you have." 

But apparently West Philadelphians do not 
allow their future to trouble them, and for 
all my puffing not one offered to consult the 
oracle. And so, as she gave us the latest 
news from Egypt, — telling us how old man 
Costello was broken-hearted over the death 
of his little grandson Tommy, and how Laura 
Lovell's temper would bring her to no good, — 
Rhody's own temper rose with the want of 
business. 

"And such a funereal as they had! And 
then they sold his goat because the old man 
could n't a-bear to look at it. — Now, then, my 
dear, sweet little Billy," — this to a youth of 
fifteen, — " get up ! You 've been sittin' there 
starin' long enough. If you don't move right 
along, I '11 cut off your head with a sharp 
knife. — And as I was sayin', my dears, that 
grasni Laura was forever a-fightin' and was 
for pullin' out her chori (knife) at me. — 
Ah ! my sweet little girls, you must n't come 
so near, or the briers will tear your pretty 
stockings ! How nicely the little ladies 
walks ! Now look at 'em. Why, they 
would n't break eggs if they was to trod 
on em. 



TO GIPSYLAND 45 

The boys and girls to whom she spoke 
tittered, but they obeyed her. 

" And are you rummered (married) yet, 
my dears ? " she asked presently. 

Then in confidential tones, and in Romany 
that the gorgio might not understand, we 
told her that we were not married yet, but 
would be soon ; that we were tired of the 
town ; and that we intended, once we had 
joined our fortunes, to go back to the roads 
where our forefathers had wandered in the 
good old times, before money and gorgio 
wives had made them ashamed of their kin- 
dred. And could she tell us — she who 
knew so well — in what part of the country 
it was best to travel, — north or south, east 
or west? 

She was not astonished ; gipsies seldom 
show surprise. But she was much interested: 
had we bought a wagon yet, and had we any 
horses ? Horses were high just now. And 
what about our tent? And if we were not 
sure which road we should travel, why not 
go theirs ? She would like to see us after 
we were married. They would be here for 
four or five weeks to come, and after that 
would move on to Baltimore. There was no 



46 TO GIPSYLAND 

better place for travelers than Baltimore and 
the country around. And so, before we left 
her, we had agreed upon the day and hour 
when we would set up our tent by theirs. 

" Good luck go with you ! And you 're 
the most beautiful young lady and gentle- 
man as I ever hopes to see," was Rhody's 
friendly farewell as we rose to go. 

It was many mornings before we were 
provided with full camping outfit. In the 
end we had to hire Henry, a darkey, who 
had a large new wagon, and knew a man 
from whom he could borrow a tent. He 
could drive ; he could sing, and play the 
banjo ; he was not afraid of gipsies ; and he 
could keep a secret. Moreover, all these ac- 
complishments were at our disposal for the 
modest sum of $5.00 a day. The Lovells, 
who in their way are swells, have a faithful 
black to wait on them. Therefore a servant 
would not seem altogether out of keeping 
with the new life we were to follow. 

The eventful day came at last. We were 
married at an unusually early hour. Friends 
regretted that the inconsiderate time-table of 
the Pennsylvania Railroad made this neces- 
sary. Our departure for our wedding-jour- 



> 
o 

H 

I 

d 

O 

o 

i— i 

H 
O 
K 
W 
3 




TO GIPSYLAND 49 

ney was to all appearances decorous. We 
drove off in a carriage. We carried for lug- 
gage two trunks and a large bag. It was 
well no one saw the contents of the latter. 
It was packed with our gipsy trousseau. Old 
clothes, disreputable hats, bright bandana 
handkerchiefs, flaring neckties, — these were 
our bridal finery. At the station we got out 
of the carriage, the trunks were lifted down, 
and the driver returned to the livery stable 
from which he had been hired. Henry, 
according to agreement, was in waiting with 
his wagon, and we gave our luggage into his 
care. Then we took a hansom and started 
for West Philadelphia. We drove as far as 
we dared. It would never do to arrive in a 
carriage, so we dismissed the driver opposite 
a confectioner's, where we bought a piece of 
wedding-cake for Rhody. We walked the 
rest of the way. 

It seemed to be a quiet morning with the 
Lovells ; the only sound we heard, when we 
reached the thicket that concealed the camp- 
ing-ground, was a queer scraping noise. But 
in the hollow we saw, instead of tent and 
wagon, only a pile of ashes and rubbish ; 
bending over it was a dark, dirty little man, 



5o 



TO GIPSYLAND 



all tattered and torn, with rings in his ears. 
He carried a large bag on his back, a tin 
pan on his arm, and a stick of an umbrella in 
his hand. With the crooked handle of the 
latter he was turning over the dirt left by the 
gipsies. 

" Have you seen the gipsies who were 
camping here ? " we asked. 

" Non capisco / " he said. 

He was an Italian rag-picker, and therefore 

a subject for J to manage. " Ah — oh! 

— ah — le ve-ve-veduto le Gi-i-tano?" the latter 
cried, in his fluent Italian. 

But the man still shook his head. " Me no 
spik Inglis," he answered. Then he drew 
himself up, put his umbrella-stick under his 
arm, righted his bag, and walked slowly 
away. We sat down by the roadside, and 
despondently watched him as he crossed 
the fields. 

We looked at each other and then at the 
ashes. Rain began to fall in big drops. We 
raised our umbrella — one of our concessions 
to civilization. An old man came and stood 
in the doorway of a shanty some distance off, 
and stared at us. " Well," said I, with a weak 
attempt at humor, "we have our wish. No 



TO GIPSYLAND 51 

one could call this a conventional way of 
making a wedding-journey ! " 

But J went and leaned over the fence, 

and said good morning to the old man. I 
followed with the wedding-cake, now a melt- 
ing, useless burden. Had he seen the gipsies 
who had been camping in the hollow ? was 
our first question. 

That he had, he told us, though he had but 
one eye, and it bad at that. They was 
all Lovells, the whole domm'd kit, and a 
blissid hard lot too. 

Did he know them ? 

No, that he did n't. What should he, an 
honest man, be after knowin' the likes of 
them ? 

Well, then, we begged his pardon, but 
could he tell us how long it was since they 
had gone away ? 

Well, it might be just about two hours ago. 
He had not seen them drive off. but it was 
more than likely they had gone down the 
road in exactly the opposite direction from 
that in which we had come. Down at the 
end there, — pointing toward the road, — if we 
turned to the left and went on till we came to 
the creek, we would find another hard lot of 



52 TO GIPSYLAND 

the varmints, with whom he had no doubt 
the Lovells had set up their tents. There 
they could all carry on their black games 
together. Upon hearing this we said good 
day. 

As we walked away we declared we were 
glad the Lovells had proved faithless. It was 
so gipsy-like for them to have folded their 
tents and stolen a march on us. Who- 
ever yet found a gipsy where or when he 
expected to ? 

Presently we came to the creek. The 
ground here rose rather abruptly, and on this 
small hill we saw the tents and wagons. 

"We will surprise Rhody," we said. But 
the surprise was all on our side. We passed 
through the opening in the blackberry hedge, 
and strolled up to the tents. In the first a 
woman, an entire stranger to us, was lying in 
a bed made on the ground. Under the shade 
of a neighboring tree, four ragged, dirty, 
black-eyed, hungry little children sat in a 
row. A dark, stout man in a ruffled shirt and 
high boots with a bright handkerchief around 
his neck sat, tailor-fashion, in front. He held 
a tin basin and a large spoon, and was feeding 
each in turn. 



TO GIPSYLAND 53 

In the next tent an old man and an old 
woman, also strangers, were comfortably 
seated smoking an after-dinner pipe, the 
plates and dishes and silver tea-pot piled up 
on one side. The old woman rose to her feet 
and hobbled toward us. She wanted to tell 
the dear, sweet young lady's fortune. Of 
course she did. I said she might, for I knew 
there was no use to ask at once for news 
of Rhody. There might have been urgent 
reasons for the Lovells to disappear suddenly, 
and these people knew nothing of us. So I 
went and sat with her at the foot of the 
farthest tree and stretched out my hand, palm 
upward in the approved manner. She 
leaned over it, and began in the usual trade 
sing-song : 

" You were born under the planets of Venus 
and Juno, my dear, and it 's love and might 
that 's your portion. You 've had trouble, 
deep, sore trouble, in the past, and your heart 
has been like to break. Can you look me in 
the face, madam, and tell me as this is n't 
true? — But the trouble 's over now and the 
way is clear before you, if you '11 but go 
straight along it. For you 've to make a 
journey before many weeks, and to begin with 
4* 



54 TO GIPSYLAND 

it a new trade that 's to bring you success 
and money. And do you understand what I 
means, Madam?" — And so she told me of the 
journey I was to make by sea, and the dis- 
tance I was to travel, and of the friends I was 
to meet, and of one in particular, Mary by 
name, of whom I was to beware, and did I 
understand what she meant ? and would I 
look her in the face and tell her as these 
things was n't true ? And I had a good hus- 
band, and he was of a kindly disposition, and 
so long as I treated him right he would be 
what he ought to be; if trouble came it would 
never be because of him. And did I under- 
stand what she meant, and could I look her 
in the face and tell her as these things was n't 
true ? Money would be ours, piles of money, 
and successful work and happiness too, if we 
were sure to steer clear of the false friend 
Mary, and if I was to do the right thing by 
my husband. And did I understand what she 
meant, and could I look her in the face and 
tell her as these things was n't true ? 

" Paraco, Dye" said I, gratefully, "mandys 
kek been dukkered since mandy sos a bitti chi 
sims adovo" ("Thank you, Mother, I have n't 
had my fortune told since I was a little child 



TO GIPSYLAND 55 

like that") — and I showed on a tree behind 
us how high I then was. 

Her hand, which she was stretching out 
toward me, suddenly dropped. Here was an 
unexpected development. But the first shock 
over, she bore it calmly. How could she 
know, she asked, that the likes of me was a 
Romany. And if she had, it was not a word 
of dukkerin I 'd have had of her. She 
would n't be caught like that again. 

" For once you told the truth, Dye" an- 
swered I, "and looking in your face I 
could n't say it was n't so. I am going on a 
journey over the sea in a few weeks' time." 

Then she winked. Such a wink ! "There 's 
alius a journey on hand, my dear." 

In the mean while J was talking with 

the old man. He was a good specimen of 
the English gipsy who is fond of his beer 
and his leisure, and who finds money to pay 
for the former and time to enjoy the latter 
by letting his wife do all the work. He was 
fat and red-faced, and his cheeks and chin 
were covered with bristles of a few days' 
growth. He was very ragged, even for a 
Romany, but he leaned back in solemn con- 
tent against a large basket which filled one 



56 TO GIPSYLAND 

side of the tent, smoking away all unpleasant 
thoughts. 

He welcomed me very politely, and begged 
me to be seated. He never, he said, would 

have thought J was a Romany, with such 

light eyes and hair. But then there was 
Davy Wharton ; his eyes were blue, and he 
could pass any day for a gorgio. 

"And you belongs to the Stanleys?' he 
continued. "I 'm a Boswell, you know. I 
know'd all the Stanleys of Radnorshire. But 
you beant one of 'em. Which lot did you 
say you came from ? Oh, your people came 
over a long time ago, did they ? And the 
head of the house was Wullum Stanley ? 
Who 'd 'a' tho't it? I know'd a Luke Stanley 
in the old country. But you say this here 
other chap married a gorgio and made lots 
of money. I 've 'eard tell of sich things. 
There 's a young Romany woman married a 
gorgio in Camden, and is livin' there as fine 
as possible. You 're sure your uncle was n't 
Luke ? I lost sight of Luke after he begin 
a-travelin' for his self. O, your uncle died 
about a hundred years ago ? Well, that 
settles it. I could n't ha' know'd him." 

He began apologizing for his appearance. 



TO GIPSYLAND $7 

He was all broke up, he said. He had been 
the whole morning looking for his son. The 
boy had been after some of his mischief and 
he had threatened him with a beating, and 
so the kid was off before daybreak. He 
had ridden down-town with them Lovells 
that was goin' Camden way, and then to the 
Rising Sun, where them other Lovells is, 
but his son was n't there. 

Was it Rhody Lovell he had ridden with ? 

Yes, she and the rest of them. They had 
given him a lift. They was — 

But we would listen no longer. We had 
learned the one fact we wanted to know. 
We said good-by at once, much to the old 
man's disappointment, for he was prepared 
for a long gossip. 

" I say, I want to tell you the news," he 
cried. 

But I picked up the wedding-cake, now 
glad that I had not given it to the Dye as 
I had thought of doing, and after a hasty 
Kushto Bak we hurried back by the way 
we had come. 

Old Boswell's family seemed to be larger 
than we had first supposed. We had gone 
but a short distance when we saw a woman 



58 TO GIPSYLAND 

with a baby and a small boy sitting under a 
tree near the roadside. The boy came run- 
ning toward us : " Please, sir, give me a 
penny." He was an absurd little fellow, with 
the features of a child, the expression of a 
knowing old man, and the unmistakable Rom- 
any eye. His corduroy breeches were too 
big for him ; so was his velveteen coat. His 
hat was a soft felt with a high crown, but it 
had lost the brim. He begged with a whine 
that showed long practice. A penny? and 
what would you do with it? "Buy arctics," 
was his prompt reply. Then I felt that his 
moral needs were greater than his physical 
wants, and I said to him, " Dont tute jintutes 
pennin a boro hockaben f " (" Don't you know 
that you 're telling a shocking story? ") Oh, 
no, he was n't. In his desire to prove his moral 
integrity, he never even noticed the change 
from English to Romany. He was campin' 
up in the woods yonder, and often the grass 
was wet, and he had no shoes or stockings, 
and arctics was very comfortable. It was 
our wedding-day, and so we gave him two 
cents. 

When we reached the wood again, a white 
covered cart was drawn up in front of it. 



TO GIPSYLAND 59 

The horse, with its head buried in a deep bag, 
was eating its dinner ; the driver was curled 
up asleep on his seat. It was Henry earning 
his $5.00 a day. We woke him and bade 
him drive us immediately to the Market street 
ferry. We knew his car would not prove a 
rapid means of transit, but in this lonely 
place there was not a carriage to be had. 
The Market street horse-cars were near, but 
in them we should be very likely to meet 
friends, or at least acquaintances, in which 
case our reputation would be lost, or made, 
forever. Once inside, we pulled down the 
flap at the back of the car, fastened it 
securely, and sat, one on each trunk, on oppo- 
site sides. Then off we went, jolting up and 
down over the rough road and still rougher 
cobblestones. What a long, weary drive it 
was ! Now we were on the track behind a 
horse-car, and brought to sudden halts every 
few minutes when it stopped for passengers. 
And now we were in front of it, with its 
driver whistling us off. Sometimes we fell in 
behind a long train of carts and crept along 
at their pace. At others we hurried, or tried 
to hurry, past them on the cobbles, to be so 
sorely shaken and thrown about that we held 



60 TO GIPSYLAND 

on to our trunks for dear life. Once, near 
the Broad street station, and again a little 
further on, we saw familiar faces which 
seemed to peer right into our wagon, and 
in fear and trembling we drew back into its 
deepest shadow. I could imagine how, if we 
were seen, the story would develop, until it 
would be said our poverty was so great we 
had made our wedding-journey as so much 
freight. 

We sat on our trunks as patiently as pos- 
sible, even after Henry had driven the car on to 
the ferry-boat, until we reached the other side 
of the river. But once in Camden, we could 
stand the jolting and the snail's pace no 
longer. Here there was small chance of 
being found out, since we knew but one girl 
and Walt Whitman in the whole place. We 
told Henry to wait by the wharf. If we did 
not return in two hours, then he must follow 
us to the reservoir, and we gave him minute 
directions as to the road he must take. 

Then we got in the horse-car. It stops, as 
everybody who has been to Camden knows, 
just where the Pennsylvania Railroad makes 
a definite line between town and country. 
Passing a grocer's, we bought a few crackers, 



TO GIPSYLAND 61 

for by this time we were hungry, and we ate 
our wedding-breakfast as we walked. Davy 
Wharton had camped by the reservoir all 
through the winter, but now that the little 
wood around it was so fresh and green and 
pretty, he was off on the roads again. Not a 
wagon or tent was to be seen. 

There was nothing to do but to walk back 
to the wharf. We still had time before dark 
to "reach the Rising Sun, where the other 
family of Lovells had already camped, and 
there was just a chance that Rhody had 
joined them. 

Then- followed another slow flight in the 
car across the river and through the crowded 
streets. All our energies were spent in keep- 
ing our places on the trunks. At first there 
was a heavy shower, but it was over before 
we came to the end of our drive. When we 
were in Broad street, within a square of the 
Rising Sun, we made Henry draw up the 
wagon in the gutter, and this time we told 
him to wait for our return. 

In the little park were four tents and three 
large wagons. Before we opened the gate 
we saw that the grass was well trampled 
down and worn away. Ragged, soiled gar- 



62 TO GIPSYLAND 

ments hung upon the fence, and scraps of 
greasy paper and linen, bits of vegetables, 
bones, pieces of bread and meat were strewn 
around the wagons. The straw inside the 
tents — the Costelloes always had carpet — 
was dirty and matted together. An atmo- 
sphere of squalor hung over the whole en- 
campment. Freedom amid such surroundings 
lost its charm. A group of six or eight men 
and women, as squalid as their belongings, 
were eating a late dinner. An old hag of the 
party came toward us: Would the dear, sweet 
young lady have her fortune told? No, she 
would not ; one fortune a day was enough. 

In front of the next tent sat a woman we 
knew, a young Mrs. Lovell. She was a not 
very near cousin of Rhody's, and had come 
from the old country but a year or two before. 
She never stirred until we were close to her ; 
but then she greeted us cordially and begged 
us to be seated, at the same time bringing a 
wooden bench from the tent. The ground 
was damp, she said. 

The conversation began with the usual 
compliments. Where had she spent the 
winter ? And we hoped she had had good 
luck, and had swindled the gorgios to her 



TO GIPSYLAND 63 

heart's content. Then it was her turn, and of 
course the first question was, were we rum- 
mered (married) yet ? 

Yes, we were. 

"And I wish you Joyce, ma'am," she ex- 
claimed, "and may you both live prosperous 
as we would, my dears, if it wa'n't for that 
'usband of mine. He 's a good man when he 
is n't matto (drunk), but he 's alius at all hours 
in the ketchema (tavern) &piin levinor (drink- 
ing beer)." 

She asked if we had heard the news, as 
how old Rosanna Lovell — "she as the papers 
and the gorgios called the Queen of the gip- 
sies, though she wa'n't no more of a real 
Queen than I am, my dears" — had been all 
of a sudden took ill and died of it. And as 
how word had been brought to Seth and 
Rhody — 

"Where is Rhody?" we interrupted. 

" Now jest wait, and ye '11 know all about 
her." And she repeated that word had been 
brought to Seth and Rhody, as was a-campin' 
over in West Philadelphia, and so they had 
started off at once that they might be in 
Long Island, where the old woman was livin', 
to bury her. They had passed by their place 



64 TO GIPSYLAND 

in the morning, but had hardly waited to say 
"Sars/ian." They was a-goin' to travel night 
and day till they got there." 

" But old Boswell told us they went Cam- 
den way," said I, blankly. 

" And you believed him ? " and she laughed 
so loud that two or three men came from 
other tents to ask what was the joke. Old 
Boswell had been up to his usual tricks, she 
said, and had been a-foolin' of the young lady 
and gentleman. 

" Old Boswell ! " cried one of the men. 
" Why, you can't never believe no word as 
he says. There ain't nowhere such an old 
villain. He carries about with him them 
there three wives of his until no decent 
Romany will have nothin' to do with him, 
and he can't open his mouth without falling 
down it for lyin'." 

" You 'd better be a-comin' inside," here 
broke in Mrs. Lovell, " the rain 's a-startin' 
again." 

As she spoke the light sprinkling we had 
already felt became a brisk shower. We 
looked in the tent. It swarmed with chil- 
dren, and was dense with smoke from a 
little stove on which an unsavory mess was 
cooking. A thorough drenching seemed 



TO GIPSYLAND 65 

better than dry clothes and feet bought at 
the price of such shelter. It was late, we 
said ; we must be hurrying on our way. 
But could she tell us when Rhody would 
be back. No, she could not. "When them 
Lovells once gets on the road, there 's no 
telling where they might n't go." Then she 
wished us Joyce again, and we thanked her 
with a dismal Kushto Bak. 

To camp with the Lovells to whom we 
had just said good-by was not to be 
thought of. To take refuge under the chest- 
nuts with the wicked old Boswell and his 
harem was scarce more desirable, and, be- 
sides, a distance of almost ten miles lay 
between us and the chestnuts. Should we 
set up a camp of our own ? And if we did 
where should we go ? I remembered the 
story the Stanleys once told me; how, after 
a long day's journey, they had pitched their 
tent in a certain held in this neighborhood 
and, though it was late at night, the owner 
of the ground had come and turned them 
off. Suppose we should meet a like fate ! 
It was not a pleasant thought. Before we 
arrived at any decision, we were back by 
the wagon. 

" Mighty sorry," grumbled Henry in greet- 



66 TO GIPSYLAND 

ing, "but I ain't gwine to stay out in the rain 
no mo'. I ain't had nuffin' to eat since nine 
o'clock ; you Ve ain't done pervided no per- 
visions, and our engagement ain't to stand 
round in this ridic'lous fashion no-how." 

This settled it. Gipsies, weather, and now 
Henry had struck. So ended our wedding- 
journey — our beautiful dream of freedom. 
But there was no time to be lost just then in 
vain regrets. We must make up our minds to 
something, and that at once ! With a deter- 
mination born of necessity, J said firmly, 

"Drive us to the New York Junction, 
Henry." 

We got to the station in a few minutes, 
dismissed Henry, consulted a time-table, 
bought our tickets, checked the wretched 
trunks and bag, and waited patiently for the 
train. No one noticed us but the porter, who 
had seen us arrive, and could not understand 
why two respectable-looking people should 
have driven up in a furniture-car. He ap- 
peared at the door every now and then, 
and stared in a bewildered and uncertain 
way, as if he wondered whether we were not 
subjects for the police. As we sat there we 
grew very hungry. We had had nothing but 



TO GIPSYLAND 67 

a few crackers since breakfast. There was no 
near restaurant, but the wedding-cake, if it 
had outlived its purpose, was still eatable. It 
made a melancholy meal, washed down with 
the warm water that always comes out of the 
railway station ice-cooler. 

Then the train arrived and we got in, the 
porter still looking after us. 




•^ ^>r 



IV 



ANOTHER year, and J and I were 

ii. abroad* together. We had been in 
London only a few days, and its roar — like 
the roar of the loom of Time, as Lowell once 
said — still fell loud and strange on our ears. 
I remember it was Sunday afternoon ; we 
had been to the Langham to see the Rye, 
and were walking down Regent street, where 
I wondered at the great heavy shutters in 
front of the store-windows, so old-fashioned 
after our Chestnut street stores, which make 
as gay a display on the first as on any other 
day of the week, and still more at the girls 
on this pleasant July day with big fur capes 
over their lawn dresses, and at the soldiers 
with the funny little caps stuck on one side 
of their heads, and at the policemen, who 

5* 69 



70 TO GIPSYLAND 

surely belonged by rights to the " Pirates 
of Penzance " and Gilbert and Sullivan. We 
were staring at any and every thing as if 
London were a big show got up for our 
benefit. And so, when, on the ladder of a 
passing 'bus, a man suddenly appeared, 
wildly waving his arms in our direction, we 
walked slower to see what new thing would 
happen now. One or two other people 
stopped. The man flew down the ladder, 
tumbled off the last two steps, and started 
to run. The conductor dashed after him : 
he had not paid. He fumbled in his pocket 
with one hand, the other he waved toward 
us. More people lingered, and in a minute 
there was quite a crowd. At last he found 
his penny, and then with a bound he was at 
our side, both hands outstretched. It was 
Herr Josef, — Herr Josef smiling and laugh- 
ing and crying, opals and diamonds flash- 
ing on his fingers, talking now his old bad 
French, now his new worse English. We 
all three walked down the street ; before we 
parted he promised to come to us at our 
hotel, and we gave him our card. Of course 
he never appeared, which perhaps was for- 
tunate ; for, if he had, I do not know what 



TO GIPSYLAND 71 

we should have done with him. From that 
day to this we have not laid eyes on Herr 
Josef, who played the cymbal so well and 
who may have been my lover. 

Another evening, while London was still 
our wonderland, J and I had been din- 
ing in a shabby foreign restaurant, whose 
name I have forgotten, in Leicester Square, 
with a French actress studying her lines, 
and an oily Jew staring out of the window, 
through which we could see the statue of 
Shakspere in the little green space, and the 
women and children whom the most famous 
dynamiter in fiction wanted to blow up. 
The dinner was bad, and we left the place 
cross and still hungry. Close by the door, 
a small dark man in red breeches and blue 
coat came sauntering quietly round the 
corner. But at sight of us he gave a sud- 
den war-whoop of joy, seized J 's em- 
barrassed hands, and kissed him again and 
again. He was one of the gipsies from the 
Eden Theater, and his ecstasy soon drew a 
large and not over-reputable crowd. Two 
policemen bore down upon it, and in the 
confusion we escaped. 

But, amusing as were these meetings, my 



72 TO GIPSYLAND 

real gipsy was not to be found in London 
streets. I was no nearer to him in England 
than I had been at home. Sometimes I 
seemed farther away, for here the poor Rom- 
any had been exploited, and traveling up 
and down the roads in fine vans with valets in 
attendance were gentlemen gipsies (save the 
mark !). As if every gipsy were not a gentle- 
man ; as if any gentleman could hope to be 
a gipsy! It was no better when, with the 
Rye, I went to see the Romany at Epsom on 
Derby Day, or to Hampton for the coster- 
mongers' race. How they all begged, these 
English Coopers and Stanleys, Boswells and 
Lovells ! — all save old Mattie Cooper, with 
face as dark as Herr Josef's or Rudi's, and 
eyes as wild. He asked for nothing, but, the 
day I met him in the soft English sunshine 
by Thames's side, gave me a great bunch of 
sweet carnations, with the bow of a prince. 
But there is only one Mattie Cooper in 
England. 

As the years passed, now and then we 
listened to Hungarian Romanies at London 
garden-parties or receptions, where, amongst 
the people enjoying themselves in the solemn 
British way, they seemed like the bird of 



TO GIPSYLAND 73 

their song caged, the deer brought to bay. 
We came across them at the Paris Exhibition 
of 1889, — but what charm was there in music 
played to the Cook's tourists sweltering in 
the heat of the Champ de Mars, covered with 
its grey dust? 

At last, suddenly and unexpectedly, as all 
good things happen, we were called to Hun- 
gary. The parks were green and gay in 
London, and the may and laburnum were in 
bloom, when we packed up everything in the 
little Westminster house and gave the keys 
to the landlord : once we had met my gipsy, 
who might say when we would come back 
again ? For the time, we too must be free as 
he to go and to come. 



V 



ONE Sunday morning early, on the way to 
Hungary, we wheeled our bicycles into 
Pirna, the little Saxon town on the Elbe ; for, 
as gipsies should, we were traveling by road. 
The day was bright, church bells were ring- 
ing softly, people were idling in the steep, 
sunny streets. As we came into the great 
square, under the heavy walls of the old 
town-hall, out upon the summer air, drown- 
ing the church bells, stirring the whole place 
into sudden life, beat the first call of the 
Rakotzy. What if it were only the town 
band playing there — men in top hats and 
black coats, with none of the gipsy fire in 
their Saxon faces ! The Rakotzy was still 
the music to hear when one's eyes were turned 
toward gipsyland. 

75 - 



7 6 



TO GIPSYLAND 



Not many days after, we were in the Aus- 
trian hills, near Ischl, climbing a high moun- 




A HILL CAMP. 



tain between endless pine-forests. In the 
dense woodland it was already twilight, and 
the air had the freshness of night, though, 



TO GIPSYLAND 77 

when we passed a clearing among the trees 
and looked down, far below, a lake, lying 
there encircled by hills, was warm and golden 
in the sunset. And just here, the loveliest 
spot in all that wild mountain-pass, two gipsy 
tents were pitched. The Romany makes his 
camp where there is most beauty by the way- 
side, as instinctively as the bee flies to the 
sweetest blossom in a flower-garden. 

"Latcho divvus!" we called as we passed. 

" Late ho divvus /" came the quick answer, 
and an old woman and a man sprang to their 
feet. But we kept on. We had a long climb 
before us, and it was getting uncomfortably 
dark among the trees. Besides, would we 
not pass the same camp every day in Hun- 
gary — would we not in many sit and listen to 
cymbal and violin? Besides — well, we did 
not know these gipsies, and the night was 
black, and we had not lost all our common 
sense even if we were gipsy-hunting. They 
were the first and last we met in Austria. 

But a week later we were in Hungary. It 
was noon : we had come to the end of the 
long street, lined with white cottages turning 
their gable-ends to it, and with rows of well- 
poles like masts along a quay, which, in the 



78 TO GIPSYLAND 

single morning's ride from Pressburg, we had 
learned to be the typical Hungarian village ; 
beyond, under a group of trees overshadow- 
ing two quiet pools, — of course the prettiest, 
greenest, shadiest oasis in the uninteresting 
stretch of cultivated plain, — we saw the first 
Hungarian camp. Out from the tents rushed 
men in the loose white drawers, or divided 
skirts, of the Hungarian peasant, women in 
ragged petticoats and bare feet, boys and 
girls as naked as God made them, funny lit- 
tle black things on the dazzling white road. 
They seemed free enough to match their 
song — free, indeed, not only as the bird in 
the air, but as the savage in desert or jungle. 
But we had been pushing our bicycles for 
hours through the sand-tracks which in lower 
Hungary pass for highways, and we were too 
tired to care who or what they were. We 
did not speak, and the wretched things ran 
after us begging, whines their only music. 

By the time we got to Raab we were twice 
as tired. Our supper eaten, we went at once 
to bed, without a look at the town, without 
asking whether in it were the gipsies we had 
come all the way from London to meet. We 
caught a glimpse of the familiar red breeches 



TO GIPSYLAND 79 

and blue coat in front of the hotel, but they 
were worn by the soldierly driver of a car- 
riage with a coronet on the door. He might 
have been the one and only gipsy left in 
Hungary, and he could not have kept us on 
our feet another minute. But as we were 
falling into our first sleep, a sweet wail broke 
on the night's stillness, a wail we knew and 
loved, and it rose and fell, now low, now 
loud, and louder, until it burst into the full 
frenzy of the Czardas. Gipsies were play- 
ing somewhere below, and they played there 
for hours, while we listened in the darkness, 
half sleeping, half waking, thinking of the 
old evenings in the Mannerchor long ago, of 
the beautiful evenings that were to come. 
And I liked it so best on our first night in 
Hungary : to hear without seeing them, as 
if we still dreamed, and yet to know all the 
time that we were really in gipsyland. 

We gave up the fight with the sand the 
next day, and took the boat at Gran, the 
Rome of Hungary, with the sham St. Peter's 
on the hilltop, and we steamed all afternoon 
down the Danube, which is blue only in 
Strauss's waltz, between low hills, past long 
rafts, steered by strange creatures in loose 



80 TO GIPSYLAND 

white, with wild hair hanging to their shoul- 
ders from under broad-brimmed black hats. 
As we sat under the awning of the upper 
deck, the opening wail of a Czardas startled 
us ; it was a weak, shaky, puny little wail from 
the violin of a tiny gipsy boy perched atop a 
pile of boxes on the lower deck, where he 
was surrounded by a crowd of those strange 
creatures in white, who wrapped themselves 
in shaggy sheepskins as the evening grew 
cooler. He fiddled away while the sun fell 
below the western hills, while the greyness 
of twilight stole over the river, while one by 
one lamps were lit on the shadowy banks, 
until, in a blaze of light, Budapest came out 
of the darkness. It seemed, now we were in 
gipsyland, that we were always making ex- 
cuses not to speak to the Romany. But we 
knew the scene that would follow if we went 
down and talked to the child, and still we 
bided our time. And then — he too was beg- 
ging for kreutzers. 

Five minutes after we had heard the last 
sweep of his bow over the strings of his 
violin, a burst of the same music, but strong, 
and steady, and loud, greeted us as we came 
to the Hotel Hungaria. The river flowed 



w 
d 

o 

> 

H 

CO 

H 

> 




TO GIPSYLAND 83 

below the windows of the room into which 
we were shown. When we leaned out, we 
could see the brilliant embankment, — the 
Corso they call it, — with the chairs under the 
trees and the people eating ices. It needed 
only an illuminated barge, like those which 
float on Venetian waters, only the twang of a 
lute, the beat of a cymbal, out there in the 
summer night, and we should have been in 
that Cairene Venice on the Ganges, that 
town of Oriental splendor and ceaseless music, 
which was the Budapest of our imagining. 
But the gipsies were in the dining-room, 
which we found — for we went down-stairs 
almost at once — was the court covered in 
by a glass roof, but, with its shrubbery and 
flowers, looking like a garden, and a garden 
on a feast day, so many were the colored 
lights among the leaves, so gay the blue 
and gold of the Hungarian officers, so elabo- 
rate the dress of the full-blown Hungarian 
beauties. At the end of the room, opposite 
the door, in a bower of palms and oleanders, 
were the gipsies, correct and commonplace in 
stiff linen and black coats, the leader with his 
violin facing the audience as he stood grin- 
ning as if in bored resignation. 



84 TO GIPSYLAND 

Every table in the large court was crowded, 
but behind the musicians ran a slightly raised 
gallery where there were fewer people. Here, 
between the palms, we could watch the mu- 
sicians sitting around the cymbal in their 
bower. They stopped playing as we took 
our places : the leader turned, they all drew 
close together, as from underneath a table he 
drew out a plate piled high with gulden notes 
and small silver coins. Eagerly they bent 
over as he counted the money and laid it to 
one side. Then on the empty plate he put one 
gulden note — about fifty cents — as a decoy, 
and stepping down, he passed from table to 
table, smiling and bowing, actually begging ! 
The real gipsy, who calls no man master, 
who plays but for his own delight, begging 
in the boro kctchema of the gorgio ! 

He came to us in our turn, when, instead 
of a rapturous Romany greeting, we gave 
him a twenty -kreutzer piece. I almost wished 
he would throw it back in our faces : but he 
did not ; he bowed and smiled superciliously 
as the coin fell silently on the pile of notes. 

The collection over, they played again, but 
there was no magic in music bought for a few 
kreutzers. It was dull and lifeless. A party 



TO GIPSYLAND 85 

of unmistakable English tourists came into 
the room, and in a second they had struck up 
" God Save the Queen," quickly turned into 
a combination of " Yankee Doodle" and the 
" Star-Spangled Banner" to make quite sure. 
This completed our disenchantment. 

But for the next week or two we went 
through a steady process of disenchantment. 
Our Budapest of the marble terraces and Ori- 
ental dirt seemed a very Chicago or Denver 
of the Pusztas : a brand-new town with bou- 
levards and electric street-cars, and the sani- 
tary engineering and other things which won 
the praise of Dr. Albert Shaw. It was well 
enough, so long as we stayed by the river ; 
from our windows we always looked to a beau- 
tiful picture : a nocturne in blue and gold 
when the lamps were lit ; dazzling in the 
early morning when the sun shone on the 
hills of Buda, and glorified even the long yel- 
low wall and green shutters of the royal pal- 
ace that was so much more like an Atlantic 
City or Cape May hotel ; a marvel of color 
when the same hills were black against the 
sunset. And there was a suggestion of the 
East in the half-naked dark men in long 
white tunics, or wide drawers, or scarce more 



86 TO GIPSYLAND 

than a cloth about their loins, who unloaded 
the barges in sight of the elegant idlers 
drinking coffee on the Corso. And we found 
the East again further down the embank- 
ment, where market-women in gay dresses 
sat by their piles of melons and peaches, 
paprikas and tomatoes, under the big umbrel- 
las which the progressive Hungarian is eager 
to change for one unbroken roof; and by the 
riverside, where were always the fishermen's 
boats with the high Greek prow and the 
gaudy Christ or Saint on the gilded cabin 
door. 

Once we went from the river we might 
have been in our own far Western towns in- 
stead of in the capital of Attila's land; except 
when in broad daylight barefooted, short- 
skirted peasant girls danced the Czardas on 
the steps of a railway station ; except at night 
when the watchman, in sheepskins, his hal- 
berd over his shoulder, made his rounds. 
But the newness of the place itself was 
aggressive. Not an old building anywhere, 
but a church done up to look as new as the 
rest, a real Turkish bath restored and work- 
ing, and a tomb of some old sheik, to which 
we never went. Why should we ? In this 




':ti 



\ 



% 






'kf 



TO GIPSYLAND 89 

modern city we knew it would be as impres- 
sive as the obelisk in Central Park. 

And the people were in keeping with their 
town. The men were tailor-made from Lon- 
don ; the women, well-dressed Parisiennes 
transported from the banks of the Seine to 
the Danube. If the wild Hun had been 
tamed until all character had gone from him, 
it was no wonder that the fire had died from 
the Romany's music, that his violin had lost 
something of its power and charm. 

For though we heard the gipsies again at 
the Hungaria, and at every other hotel where 
they played, at the big Cafe de l'Opera in the 
Andrassy-strasse, and at the smaller res- 
taurants where, on Sunday evenings, artisans 
and soldiers grew noisy over their half liter, 
always they seemed spiritless and subdued. 
There was no difference except that at the 
cafe and the cheap restaurants, when the 
leader made his rounds, his plate was filled 
with coppers. 

We thought perhaps it was playing indoors 
that oppressed them, playing in close cafes 
and hotel courts when half Budapest was 
drinking coffee in flower-scented gardens and 
on the oleander-shaded pavement, or eating 



9 o 



TO GIPSYLAND 



suppers in the middle of the street and on 
the sidewalks, where at every table candles 
spluttered and sparkled in the darkness : not 




w 
w 
fa 
fa 
o 
u 

h— I 

>— i 
& 
Q 



even in France or Italy do people live more 
in the open air than in Hungary. And so, 
when the friends we made in Budapest told 



TO GIPSYLAND 91 

us that gipsies played at the Margarethen- 
insel,' the island in the Danube which the 
Archduke Josef, its owner, has turned into a 
public park, we took the little steamboat late 
one hot September day and steamed up 
against the current, under the suspension- 
bridge, past the huge pile of the new par- 
liament buildings, past the gay Kaiser Bad, 
with its brazen German band, to the pretty 
green island. Till twilight we walked along 
the trim, well-kept paths and by the sweet 
flower-garden, its roses still in blossom, and 
by the ruins of an old nunnery, to the res- 
taurant at the upper end. There are baths 
here, as there are at every turn in Budapest 
and all Hungary, and hotels where people 
come for the summer, and the crowd was the 
same one sees at the sea-shore or in the 
mountains anywhere. The gipsies were al- 
ready in the band-stand ; among them were 
several who looked like Jews, and it seemed 
to us that the plate was passed oftener than 
at the Hungaria or the Cafe de l'Opera. 

Another afternoon we went to the Volks- 
garten. There was a home-like intensity in 
the September heat, which made it impossible 



92 TO GIPSYLAND 

to walk, and it was in one of the old-fashioned 
busses, with the hood in front, that we rattled 
up the wide Andrassy-strasse, where no two 
houses, proud citizens boast, are alike, though 
there is but one, the big Cafe Reuter, which 
might with artistic profit have served as model 
for the others. We had left immaculate busi- 
ness-men eating ices among the geraniums of 
the Kiosk on the Danube ; we found their 
more immaculate wives and children eating 
ices and concocting scandal under the trees of 
the Volksgarten, and, though the sun was still 
high in the heavens, the music had begun. 
There were again Jews among the gipsies 
here, we thought, and before our ice was fin- 
ished the plate had been passed twice. 

It mattered little whether they tuned their 
violins in doors or out ; we missed the old 
swing and rhythm that had set us to dream- 
ing dreams in the shabby Mannerchor. And 
why were all so bent on wearing the ugly 
clothes of the gorgio ? We should have liked 
better the old red breeches and blue coats, 
even if they were but half soldier's uniform, 
half servant's livery. There were days when, 
in our disappointment, we wondered sadly 



v 




THE ANDRASSY-STRASSE 



TO GIPSYLAND 95 

whether the fault lay with us, whether it was 
because our time had come 

To creep in close about the fire 
And tell grey tales of what we were, and dream 
Old dreams and faded. 

It was after the visit to the Volksgarten 
that we heard of Budapest's yearly market, 
which lasts for a week, and often attracts 
from the far Karpathians families of gipsies 
who bring wooden spoons and platters for 
sale. The city has grown up about the 
market-place where the fair is held. From 
the modern streets with the well-dressed peo- 
ple, the electric cars, and the mounted police- 
men waiting in the quiet Rings for the traffic's 
rush and crush, which it is hoped the years 
and Dr. Shaw's article and our book will 
bring, it was but a step to the open fields, now 
covered with tents and booths, and filled with 
strange peoples in stranger garments — Hun- 
garian peasants, the men in white divided 
skirts, high boots, and jackets brave with sil- 
ver buttons ; the women with bright ribbons 
braided in their hair, their many skirts, one 
over the other, standing out like crinoline, 
swaying at every step like a ballet-dancer's, 



9 6 



TO GIPSYLAND 




A GOOD BELT. 



showing bare feet or high boots; Slovaks 
from the mountains, unkempt hair in disorder 
about their shoulders, loose shirts confined by 



TO GIPSYLAND 97 

enormously wide, brass- studded leather belts, 
embroidered sheepskin jackets; greasy Polish 
Jews, the single curl over each ear and the 
long caftans ; soldiers in blue tights slipped 
inside their shoes ; policemen in high boots, 
like the peasants, a cockade falling on one 
side over the straight brim of their stiff felt 
hats ; Serbs in baggy blue Turkish trousers 
and fez ; every kind of delightful creature 
save a gipsy. 

We had walked again and again in the 
brilliant sunshine, up and down between the 
booths, as characterless as the fine shops in 
the Waitzen or Andrassy-strasse. The ground 
was strewn with rind of the watermelons upon 
which every one had breakfasted, when, to- 
ward noon, a sound of music brought us back 
to our starting-place. Two rows of tent res- 
taurants, shut earlier in the morning, were 
now open, and from each came savory smells 
and deafening noise. In some were Serbs 
with a curious little instrument, half mando- 
lin, half violin ; but in the greater number 
were gipsies, who had joined that vast crowd 
without our seeing them, though they alone 
wore a dress that would have passed un- 
noticed in the Bowery or in Whitechapel. 



98 TO GIPSYLAND 

We went into one of the tents — it made 
little difference which ; there was really no 
choice. But the Romanies here, we thought, 
looked a trifle darker and wilder. Two or 
three were as yellow as Hindus, and in their 
eyes was the true gipsy gleam ; all had the 
regular, refined features of their race. But 
the mud of weeks was on their boots and 
trousers; the greasy Jews in the rear booths 
would have scorned their coats and hats ; 
their linen had not been changed for days. 
They were not even picturesque in their dirt 
and rags. The leader was gravely tipsy, but 
he steadied himself as we came in, and with a 
show of style began to lead a shrill, screechy 
Czardas that set our very teeth on edge. I 
had believed that every Hungarian gipsy 
plays by instinct, as a bird sings; but the 
music of these men was as forlorn as them- 
selves. 

J ordered beer, for we could not sit 

there without eating or drinking, and he got 
out a gulden note, as he had no small change, 
to pay. There was the glare of a starved wild 
beast in the leader's eyes when he saw it ; I 
think he must have pounced upon it, had not 
the proprietor of the restaurant captured it 



TO GIPSYLAND 99 

in time. We could not stand that glare; 
there were in it hunger and thirst, the story of 
a long spell of bad luck. We did not like to 
offer food, though I doubt if they would have 
objected, but we had to do something for our 

own comfort, and J asked them to have 

a glass of beer with him. Then we said a 
few words in Romany in half-hearted fashion. 
We did not want to, but it was foolish to 
keep on waiting indefinitely for the proper 
kind of gipsy, who gave no sign of his exis- 
tence. They tried to pretend to be pleased, 
but it was a hollow mockery all around. The 
flageolet-player, in a burst of confidence, 
showed me how his instrument had worn 
away his upper teeth. The tipsy leader kissed 
my hand, while his greedy eyes followed 

J 's every movement. They even came 

and made a circle about the table, and " played 
into our ear." It would have been funny had 
it been less tragic ; for their playing was 
abominable, and it was the proprietor who 
bade them play. It was he too who signaled 
to them to strike up the Rakotzy when, heart- 
sick, after the leader had snatched our money, 
we started to go. Then we saw why it had 
been to his interest to keep us ; outside, peo- 



ioo TO GIPSYLAND 

pie had gathered, others looked over the can- 
vas walls of the tent. Like the man who beats 
the drum at the side-show, we were drawing 
the crowd. We passed by the other tents 
without stopping. 

Often in our evening prowls through the 
streets we heard the same screechy Czardas 
coming from those smaller drinking-places 
which hang out the primitive painting of a 
bottle of yellow wine and a loaf of yellower 
bread with a knife stuck in it, always more 
intelligible to us than the signs in Magyar 
that looked so barbarous in print and sounded 
so musical when spoken. We never went in- 
side, where we knew we should see the same 
poor starved wretches, where we should be 
looked upon as intruders by the people, as a 
bank to be broken by the gipsies, who could 
not be supposed to understand that our only 
capital was much devotion to them, for which 
they did not care, and little money, for which 
they did care to a degree that we took as an 
offense. We did not mind the begging of 
the wandering gipsies we met on the road 
one day near the old Roman Aquincum. 
They were so jolly about it. It was their lit- 
tle game in life, the one art they cultivated; 



i 



TO GIPSYLAND 



IOI 



and the whining of the tiny, naked, black 
boys and girls, turning somersaults in the hot 
sunshine, meant no more than the wheedling 
of the English gipsy woman who wants to 
tell your fortune. But those others, who pre- 



m. m 




A REAL EGYPTIAN. 



tended to be musicians when they were beg- 
gars, were too dead in earnest. They would 
have bartered all the freedom of the deer in the 
forest, had they possessed it, for kreutzers. 
It was no better in the near villages, to 



102 TO GIPSYLAND 

which we went once or twice on Sunday 
afternoons. We found peasants dancing the 
Czardas in the stuffy inn, but when we came 
the gipsies stopped playing and began to beg. 
They were every bit as much in earnest in 
the big hotels ; but there they were prosper- 
ous, and after the first shock it gave me to 
see my unknown lover's kinsmen passing 
round the plate like respectable vestrymen in 
church, we enjoyed the humor of it. The 
gipsies are graceful in whatever they do. If 
these musicians swindled us, it was with a 
style that won our hearts. For example, if 
you had just sat down when the collection 
began, the leader on his rounds had a pretty 
way of not handing you the plate. The first 
time we thought he was paying us a personal 
compliment, for it happened to be the leader 
with the face of a Jew, who had got to know 
us so well that he bowed and smiled when 
we entered or left the dining-room — as, how- 
ever, we discovered afterward, he smiled and 
bowed to every one seen for the second time. 
But this evening, if he passed us by in the 
beginning, his next collection began at our 
table ; of course he got twice as much for 
his politeness, as he knew he would. 



TO GIPSYLAND 103 

I remember one evening, after he had made 
us believe that he was thinking of nobody in 
the room but ourselves, that he was playing 
for us alone, and we were ready to shower 
untold wealth upon him, he stepped from his 
green bower (I can still feel myself smiling 
complacently as he came), and, with never a 
glance at us, went to a near table to "play 
in the ear" of a Hungarian whose head was 
bowed, whose face was tear-stained, whose 
bottle of szomorodni was half empty, and who 
was enjoying himself thoroughly. And then 
he went back to the bower with a handful of 
notes — not ours. 

More than that once, in crowded dining- 
room, did we see a strong, full-grown man, 
with his elbows on the table, his hands clutch- 
ing his head, convulsively crying like a child, 
without shame or restraint, and thrusting 
piles of gulden notes into the hands of the 
gipsy at his side. They were really not like 
other men, after all ; it is not in every coun- 
try you see people weeping bitterly when 
they are merriest. 

And, by and by, we discovered that, de- 
spite the English tailors, there was a special 
Hungarian type, though how much the little 



104 TO GIPSYLAND 

strip of narrow side-whisker, worn as close to 
the ear as possible, had to do with making it, 
we could never quite determine. And then 
we began to find the gipsy. 

It had grown so hot with September, and 
the nights were so close and still, that for a 
week we had been dining at one of the little 
groups of tables, each with its single candle, 
ranged in the middle of the street, when one 
evening, with friends, we went again to the 
brilliant green hotel court. We came in late ; 
the place was crowded, and the music had 
long since begun. It may have been some- 
thing in our mood, but for the first time it 
seemed to us that there was the right ring in 
violins and cymbal. 

Racz Pal was leading — there was a different 
leader every night. He was one of the thirty- 
three sons of the more famous gipsy of the 
same name who had fought for his country, 
and had been an exile with Kossuth, and 
Pulszki, and Teleki, and Mogyorody, and all 
the other patriots of '48. He was known 
from one end of Hungary to the other, and 
to his funeral, but a few years since, great 
magnates had gone as if he were a prince. 

The entire width of the court separated our 



TO GIPSYLAND 107 

table from the musicians, but we had not been 
in the room five minutes before Racz Pal 
knew, as well as we did ourselves, that we felt 
his music, that it had struck a responsive 
chord. The gipsies for so many generations 
have swayed the souls of men with their 
violins, that now they can tell by instinct 
when their charm has worked. He watched 
us as we sat there, mostly silent : you do not 
want to talk when the gipsies are really play- 
ing. When he came with the plate, which 
he did soon enough, he asked what he must 
play for us. For the first time I wanted in 
the old way to speak to the gipsy. It was 
almost unconsciously, almost as if it were the 
one natural thing to do, that I said a word or 
two of Romany. He answered in far better 
English as he stood there, plate extended, 
correct and dignified. But when he went 
back among the oleanders and took up his 
violin, he played only the Czardas, the waltzes, 
the overtures to which we had listened in the 
stifling Mannerchor or on the airy hill at Bel- 
mont. Then, at times, I had dreamed dreams 
of Hungary ; but now it was in the past I 
lived. We are young but once. Had I had 
but a little of the Hungarian's simplicity, I 



108 TO GIPSYLAND 

could have put my head down too and cried 
for my lost youth and its romance. 

The music stopped only when now and then 
Racz Pal came to ask what next his violin 
must sing for us. And every great joy of that 
long-lost summer sprang into life again as 
they played ; my heart was breaking with its 
every sorrow. There was the scent of dried 
rose-leaves in their music, the windings of the 
river in the moonlight, the voice of love. 

I think the diners must have gone without 
my knowing it, for the waiters began putting 
out the lights here and there, until all the 
court was in cool darkness except in our 
corner. But still the gipsies played. 

Presently Racz Pal, always playing, came 
slowly through the darkness to my side, his 
violin close to my ear, its every note thrilling 
me with pain that was almost unendurable in 
its sweetness. One by one the others, always 
playing, crept down until all stood around us 
among the shadows. I do not know whether 
we gave them more money ; I do not think 
they knew either. But they played on and 
on, exulting in their power. Was it with 
tears my cheeks were wet, I wonder? Was 
there really some one opposite with head bent 



TO GIPSYLAND 109 

low, his clenched fists beating the table, sing- 
ing like mad ? And who was sober enough 
to push back his chair and break the charm ? 
Not I. The violin was too sweet in my ear. 
And these wild creatures with flaming eyes 
and faces aglow, who kissed my hands, were 
they the musicians who had seemed so cold 
and passionless as they sat among the palms 
and oleanders ? 

We came to our senses the next morn- 
ing in the sunlight that was pouring in hot 
cheerfulness on the hills of Buda, while the 
only music was the puffing and whistling of 
the little steamboats across the Danube, and 
it was possible to think as well as feel. Then 
we decided that it was worth waiting three 
weeks for one such night of beauty, and that 
if Racz Pal and the others had only worn curls 
and silver buttons, and had been playing like 
that in camp by quiet stream or in lonely wood- 
land, and we had come upon them by chance, 
our ideal had been realized, our quest over. 

It was then, too, that for the first time it 
occurred to me how very little Racz Pal had 
cared for my Romany — such as it was. 
Every time I had spoken it, he had answered 
in English or German. But another evening 



no TO GIPSYLAND 

that same week, J had gone somewhere, 

and I was dining alone in a small room next to 
the large court, where, at a table under the 
light, I could now read my book, now listen 
to the music. I had not looked to see who 
was leading. But when collection-time came, 
there was a step on the stairs to my quiet re- 
treat, and Racz Pal, plate in hand, appeared 
in the doorway. He dropped the plate on the 
first table, and with hands outstretched ran to 
where I sat. Now that I was alone, he poured 
forth a torrent of Romany so fast and inex- 
haustible that I could not follow it. " Then 
you do talk Romany ? " I said. Why, of 
course ; he talked nothing else at home with 
his own people. The Tzigans of Hungary 
were still true Roms. Wherever we might 
journey, in the plain, or, better still, in Tran- 
sylvania, where there were so many Romany 
chals, we should hear the soft-flowing speech 
of their fathers. 

After J and I had talked this over, we 

got our map of Hungary, and studied it. We 
might as well be off on the roads while the 
September sun was still hot, the September 
sky still cloudless. We arranged to start 
from Budapest on the next Monday. 

On Sunday afternoon we went for the last 



TO GIPSYLAND in 

time to the high villa on the Blocksberg where 
our every Sunday had been spent. But this 
was an occasion in itself. It was some pop- 
ular saint's day, and all morning in Pest we 
had seen flowers borne through the streets 
to those named in honor of the saint; among 
them was our friend, the mother in the villa. 
And so, when we sat down to supper, there 
were great bunches of roses and carnations 
and gladioli on the long tables that ran 
around three sides of the large dining-hall, and 
all her friends had come to bring their good 
wishes. Nor were we the only foreigners, for 
at the villa Americans were as welcome as 
prodigals, and many, with us, have carried 
away golden memories of the gay hours spent 
there. There were toasts after supper over 
the amber wine of Hungary. The colonel, 
straight and erect and soldier-like, as in the 
days long past when he defended his country's 
freedom at Kossuth's side, made his sonorous 
Magyar speech to the mother, and then pro- 
posed our health in English, — for during years 
of exile he lived in England, — and praised 
me — I blush a little now, remembering it — 
as the brave sportswoman who had cycled all 
the way from Calais to Budapest. Above the 
loud cries of Eljen, and Servus, and Mahlzeit, 



ii2 TO GIPSYLAND 

as everybody shook hands with everybody 
else, rose the gipsy music, for gipsies with 
violins and cymbal sat at the door. What 
would a feast in Magyarland be without them ? 

When we went into the garden, hanging lan- 
terns burned among the trees, and the moon- 
light lay white and wide on the plain and on 
the river far below. The gipsies followed to 
the terrace, where it was light enough for men 
who play from their hearts, as Rudi said. 
One by one, the wandering couples began 
to dance, until at last all were stamping and 
whirling and shouting in the mad Czardas. 
When there was a pause in the playing, from 
the road at the foot of the hill came a faint 
echo answering the violins in the garden ; for 
lights there too flickered among the trees, 
and in the silver dust other dancers stamped 
and whirled. And they danced and danced 
down there in the open road, and up above in 
the garden, while the moon rose higher and 
higher. 

Once, the dancers, hot and breathless, 
trooped into the house to drink long cooling 
draughts of the amber wine. And it was then 
I spoke in Romany to the leader as he stayed 
there in the moonlight, grave and sad, as 
gipsies so often seem. He said little, but he 



TO GIPSYLAND 113 

told me that now, for me, he would play a 
tacho Romani gilli — a real gipsy song. It 
was wild and fierce as the moan and roar of 
the wind through the pine forest at night, 
this passionate defiance of the weary outcast. 
They say the Romanies have no music of their 
own, but never have I heard a song as strange 
and savage as the gilli sung by the violins in 
the moonlight, among the swinging lanterns. 

The dancers came out, and a new Czardas 
began. They danced, and then they sang, 
and then they danced again, while the moon 
sank lower and lower ; they danced while the 
first gray of the dawn streaked the eastern 
sky beyond the Danube and the plain of 
Pest ; they danced till the sun was high in 
the heavens and the river flowed a stream of 
gold through the fields — that is, they danced, 
and the gipsies played, till nine in the morning. 

This, our last in Budapest, was the per- 
fect night of our dreams. Only, when we 
dreamed, the gipsies, wandering in the moon- 
light, stopped of their own accord where the 
dancers waited, and played for nothing but 
the love of playing. Our perfect gipsy was 
not there ; we knew now that we could never 
find him in cities, but must search for him in 
his own home on the roads. 

8 



VI 



A DAY as hot as midsummer, a burning- 
sky without a cloud, a green country bril- 
liant in blinding light, what could have been 
better for our start, even if we were stifling 
in the railway-carriage filled with people 
talking* now German, now Hungarian, now a 
totally unknown tongue, evidently sampling 
the three languages of the printed notice 
above the seats ? We were speeding on our 
way to Transylvania, and our bicycles were 
in the baggage-car. 

That little word of Racz Pal's, a few nights 
before, had first turned our thoughts toward 
the home of Hunyacli Janos, the great Hunga- 
rian hero, whose name hitherto had meant for 
us but a very nasty mineral water. Hun- 
gary was far too big for an autumn's wander- 

115 



n6 TO GIPSYLAND 

ings to carry one across its entire length and 
breadth, as we had fondly hoped before we 
knew anything about it ; and we were going 
to that part where were the most gipsies and 
the best roads. Our knapsacks were full of let- 
ters of introduction which would enable us 
to study the country's institutions and pro- 
gress, for no one in Budapest believed in our 

interest in the gipsies ; and in J 's pocket, 

along with his passport, was an impressive 
paper from the Minister of the Interior — im- 
pressive probably because we could not read 
it — which explained to whomsoever it might 
concern that we were not Russian spies or 
dangerous characters. 

All the afternoon we were crossing the 
vast, treeless plain, until dusk and Debreczen 
came together — Debreczen, where we had 
been warned we must not fail to stop, because 
it was such a thoroughly typical Hungarian 
town, and because the mayor would turn out 
in his coach and four to show us the sights. 
But the mayor was not a gipsy, and we 
stayed only long enough to see the strange 
women, with their faces half covered in Eastern 
fashion, who crouched in the shadows of the 
station, and the stranger men, in tall black 



TO GIPSYLAND 



117 



sheepskin caps and priest-like cloaks, who 
looked ready to ascend the sacrificial altar, but 
who were only buying tickets at the office. 




WAITING TO BE HIRED. 



Some time during the night, we must have 
journeyed out of the plain for, when we 
awoke, mountains shut us in on every side. 
I shall never forget our arrival at Marmaros 
Sziget in the pale dawn, when a hundred or 



n8 TO GIPSYLAND 

more men, like so many savages, in shaggy 
sheepskins, their hair falling in long tangles, 
tumbled out of the train, and suddenly, at a 
word of command, fell into line, and two by 
two, with military step, marched toward the 
town. We followed with our bicycles and an 
escort of Polish Jews, in curls and caftans, 
bent on making us, machines and all, take 
their old hacks. Into the large square the 
company in sheepskins marched, and there, 
in long rows, silent and stern, stood more 
men like them, over their shoulders great 
scythes black and threatening against the 
eastern sky, now fiery with the rising of the 
sun. Was it the beginning of another peas- 
ant rebellion away off here in this remote 
corner of northeastern Hungary ? 

Seen in broad daylight, the men with the 
scythes were only laborers waiting to be 
hired, the savages from the train only reserves 
come for their summer manceuvers. We 
found them later in the open streets stuffing 
their divided skirts into the blue tights of the 
Austrian infantry uniform, cutting their hair, 
shaving their beards, and showing how a pic- 
turesque peasant could be transformed into a 
commonplace soldier. But this very explana- 



TO GIPSYLAND 121 

tion made the whole town with its fantastic 
groups seem still more artificial, like a scene 
upon the stage. It was the beginning of the 
East, where men wear impossible costumes ; 
and before the morning was over we dis- 
covered such an incredible mixture of races 
— Magyars, Wallachs, Ruthenians, Germans, 
Polish Jews, gipsies — that the crowd sug- 
gested nothing so much as an illustrated 
ethnological catalogue. It was the same 
throughout Transylvania, but this first glimpse 
of the people fairly took our breath away. 
And it seemed more extraordinary because, 
wild and barbarous as were the peasants in 
their dress, we were yet in the heart of 
Western civilization. The town with the 
outlandish name was a Budapest in mini- 
ature, with brand-new houses, and banks, 
and hotels. 

Not for us in Sziget was it necessary that a 
kettle should be hunp* over the fire of brush- 
wood ; not for us did smoke go curling up 
amone the trees. Instead of being- allowed to 
find our gipsy, we had to get dressed and go 
out to dinner in a house full of pictures from 
Vienna and Paris — one of those long, ram- 
bling, single-storied Hungarian houses with 



122 TO GIPSYLAND 

the rooms opening into each other and beds 
standing around promiscuously where you least 
looked for them. Had Romanies been there, 
we might have talked a trifle more intelligibly 
than with our host and his wife and daughter. 
Still the evening was gay. Only, when we 
asked if there were Tzigans about the town, 
they thought perhaps so, somewhere down the 
road. But what matter ? We must come with 
them to-morrow to the famous salt-mines close 

by, and the day after J should go on a 

bear-hunt got up for his especial benefit. 

But it was gipsies we wanted, not bears and 
mines, though, like our friends in Budapest, 
they would not believe it. And so, the next 
morning early, we were off, when only the 
peasants with their scythes were in the market- 
place to see our start. In the growing light 
we rode between the sheepskins, down the 
long street of the Wallachs, with a well-pole 
at every cottage gate ; past the encampment 
where the soldiers were already stirring; and 
then through little villages where stately Rou- 
manian women in gay aprons stood at the 
wells with jugs that a Greek designed, or men 
watered their cattle ; through the open coun- 
try, the peasants working in the fields making 



5? 

> 

r 1 

> 
o 




TO GIPSYLAND 125 

lines of white against the dark belts of wood- 
land ; and on, into the lonely mountains. 

What places there were for the tent of the 
wanderer on that first day's journey ! — in the 
little leafy dell by the brookside, under the 
chestnuts shading the high mountain-pass. 
But it was only in Felso Banya, in the kitchen 
of the one inn in the town, that we found him. 
A woman was cooking at the large stove ; 
another, in the caged-in corner to which we 
got so used in small Transylvanian inns, was 
chopping melons with a hatchet, — for the 
pigs, probably, — and at the far end of the 
room sat a group of men whose features we 
could not distinguish in the darkness. But as 
the landlord, a stanch Magyar who spoke no 
German, brought up his dishes that we might 
make our choice, we heard a few words of 
Romany, and, as the lamps were lit, we saw 
the violins on the table, and the dark faces. 
They were eating nothing, drinking nothing, 
doing nothing, and their talk, as it reached us, 
was all of kreutzers and guldens, guldens and 
kretitzers, which, however, no one came to 
give them. We waited and waited, and still 
we were the only guests, still the violins lay 
untouched on the table. We were so sleepy 



126 TO GIPSYLAND 

after our long ride in the hills, that at last we 
went to bed and left them there to their end- 
less talk of guldens and kreutzers, which had 
killed within us the desire to speak. 

I do not know how late it was when we 
woke with a start in the great bare, stone 
guest-chamber with the gratings at the win- 
dow that gave upon the street ; we had been 

sleeping soundly, though J 's only bed 

was a shabby sofa with sheets and blankets 
thrown loosely over it. There was a crash of 
music, struggling with fierce voices ; at last, 
rising above them, the Czardas again ; a 
scuffling, a string of good strong Romany 
oaths, the banging of doors, and — silence. 
It was a common tavern brawl, for which 
one need not travel to Hungary. And yet 
the gipsies had played, and we had been 
sleeping. 

We never knew what happened in the 
night, for we could speak no word to the 
landlord when, in the morning, he came smil- 
ing with our bill chalked upon a slate. The 
women in sheepskins, selling tomatoes and 
big red paprikas, and the white oxen lazily 
chewing the cud in the market-place, were 
still in shadow when we set out down the 




RESTING. 



TO GIPSYLAND 129 

valley, following the river, riding past the 
white-robed peasants going to the gold- 
mines, and the carts with Wallachs in sheep- 
skins low in the bottom, like us on the way to 
Nagy Banya. 

It was the day of the weekly market there, 
and the square was a solid mass of sheepskins 
and white oxen. We never ceased to marvel 
at these markets, with their extravagant 
display of costume, always differing, if only 
slightly, according to town or village from 
which the peasants came. For us, they 
never lost their freshness and infinite variety. 
But now, I think, I remember best those we 
saw first, when everything was so new and 
strange, And it was stranger in Nagy 
Banya to step across centuries of civiliza- 
tion, from the midst of the wild sheepskins, 
into a house where etchings by Rembrandt, 
and drawings by Victor Hugo, and rare old 
tapestries hung on the walls ; where the 
latest books lay within easy reach ; and where 
London tailors and Paris milliners had set 
the fashion. For in this pretty town, lying 
low among the hills, our pile of letters was 
lowered by one, and we were welcomed to it, 

as none but Hungarians can give you wel- 

9 



130 



TO GIPSYLAND 




p Jw is ^ M Pit' " II I I >» V*^ 

r 1 1 ft \\ttl P <Li 



*■ 



THE MARKET AT NAGY BANYA. 



come, by another of those brave patriots of 
'48, a man whose boast it- is that in his day 



TO GIPSYLAND 131 

no battle for freedom was fought in Europe 
without him. He is old now, his hair is 
white, but the same fire burns bright within 
him. He is a Magyar to the heart's core, 
and I like to recall how he received us with 
scowls so -long as we spoke the hated Ger- 
man, with open arms once we dropped it 
for French, and he had read the letter we 
brought from the good colonel in Budapest 1 
I wish I could linger on the days we 
spent in Nagy Banya, the afternoons in the 
flower-garden, with glimpses of the distant 
mountains; the drives down the cool, green 
valley, where the gold-mines are; the walks 
in the little park, where the people take 
their afternoon stroll. There is nothing the 
world over like the Hungarian kindness, and 
the friends we made here could not do 
enough for us. "Tell us what we can do for 
you?" — that was the beginning and end of 
all our talks. We said once we wanted 
to see gipsies. Oh, that was easily man- 
aged, was their answer. We were dining 
with them at the time, and a wonderful din- 

1 It was only a few months after this was written that news reached 
us of his death. With Count Teleki, Hungary lost one of her bravest 
patriots. 



132 TO GIPSYLAND 

ner it was, all Hungarian, for our benefit: gul- 
yas and paprikas and paradeis huhn, washed 
down with old szomorodni of some famous 
vintage, and mineral water fresh that morn- 
ing from springs just beyond the town, and 
set on the table in the beautiful Greek urn 
in which the peasant woman had brought it, 
a bunch of oak-leaves for cork. The cloth 
was laid in the porch, it was such a still, hot 
day. A man in loose white drawers and shirt, 
carrying spade and rake, passed across the 
garden to the stables. 

"Tzigan! Tzigan!" called the old patriot, 
from where he sat at the head of the table. 

The man came running to the porch. As 
he ran, he took off the cap from the tangled 
mass of his black hair, and he now stood 
with it in his hand, as wild and shy as the 
deer just tamed, the bird just caged. There 
was the beauty of the East in his dark face, 
the gleam of the gipsy in his darker eye. 

The master filled a glass with wine, and 
gave it to him. He drank it, cap in hand ; 
drank it greedily, thirstily, unabashed. Then, 
at the word of command, he put down the 
empty glass and ran, fleet as a whipped 
hound, to the stables. He was one of their 



TO GIPSYLAND 



133 



gipsies, and it was his day to work for them, 
they explained. 

Their gipsies ! His day to work for them! 

We understood better the next morning 




A CORN-STALK CABIN. 



when they drove us in their carriage, behind 
the little Roumanian driver in his blue-and- 
white summer livery, and the long ribbons 
dangling from his hat worn jauntily on one 
side, out from the town, across the plain, to 
the group of thatched cottages where flax 



134 TO GIPSYLAND 

was drying in the tiny gardens, and to the 
big house with the last roses blooming about 
the door, and far away, on the horizon, the 
mountains of the Karpathian Girl melting 
into pale blue shadows in the noonday heat. 
We left the carriage, and the pretty daughter 
and her brother took us to the gipsy huts on 
the outskirts of the village. The trees hid 
the nearest cottages. In front, the corn- 
fields, the ears all picked, the green leaves 
gone, but the stalks still standing, brown and 
withered, stretched to the shadowy heights. 
The blue smoke was lazily curling upward 
from the kettle hung over the fire, as I had so 
often seen it by the Camden reservoir ; a man 
stood in the doorway of one of the huts, and 
an old brown witch of a Dye sat close to it on 
the parched grass, smoking a pipe. It might 
have been Rosanna Lovell, only Rosanna 
never would have jumped up and made such 
humble bows to the gorgio. And never in 
Camden or Philadelphia had we seen a group 
like that gathered about another kettle fur- 
ther on. A young woman, dark and beauti- 
ful, her white teeth gleaming as we came, 
crouched there with a naked brown baby in 
her lap; in front of her, in a semicircle around 



TO GIPSYLAND 



135 



the fire, three boys as brown and naked, like 
little imps of darkness, were sitting cross- 
legged. From the hut stepped forth a young 



:r«m 



:%, 




A FOND PARENT AND HIS FAMILY KOLTO. 

man in a pair of wide drawers, but stripped 
to the waist, as coal-black as a negro. It was 
a family party an explorer would not have 
been surprised to find in Africa. They were 



136 TO GIPSYLAND 

wilder far than any gipsies we had ever met 
upon the roads at home. One of the boys, 
when he saw us, sprang to his feet, and with 
a bound was in the corn-held, flying and hid- 
ing among the corn-stalks as tall as himself. 

But these were not gipsy tents, these huts 
burrowed deep into the ground, with walls 
and roof of wood and mortar, thatched with 
corn-shucks. These were not tents to be 
thrown over the horse's back, or strapped 
under the van, when the cold blasts from the 
mountains gave the signal for the journey 
down into the lowland and far away to the 
south. For the gipsies living in them, 
though they ran naked like so many savages 
of the desert, had given up forever the old 
sweet, free life when they wandered at will 
and knew no man for master. They had come 
many years ago to squat, as we would say, 
upon the great lord's estate, and he had let 
them stay, only exacting for payment a day's 
work in every week from each grown man. 
The peasants in '48 may have been freed, but 
the gipsies in gipsyland have become slaves 
in their place, though many a Romany chal 
followed Kossuth into the field against the 
hated Austrian. Poverty and dirt and rags 



TO GIPSYLAND 



137 



are a small price to give for freedom, but they 
have lost this priceless heirloom of their race 
and kept only its bitterest burdens. They 




OFF TO THE BRICK-YARDS. 



are poorer than their kinsmen who travel over 
our American roads ; they are more tied to 
the land upon which they dwell than the peas- 
ants in the near cottages. As they sit there 
in the sunshine, looking over to the moun- 



138 TO GIPSYLAND 

tains, how often, I wonder, are they haunted 
by the old love of change and adventure ? 

All the gipsies were working about Nagy 
Banya. We saw the pretty Romany boys 
bringing milk into the town, though, had 
they been carrying it from the gorgio, it 
would have been more to our liking. We 
saw old white-bearded men coming from the 
fields. Men and women both were fetching 
and carrying in the brick-yards in the valley 
on the other side of the town. Like the 
gorgio, or Philistine, they were forced to eat 
their bread — and such stale, musty bread! — 
by the sweat of their brow. 

And it was the same when we left Nagy 
Banya and were on the road again. Near 
the great house were always the gipsy huts, 
which we soon got to know as well as already 
we knew the gipsy himself. 

The day we rode away from that friendly 
town and its friendlier people, and were in 
the hills that lie between it and Dees, we 
met a wagon with two gipsy women loung- 
ing low in the straw at the bottom, and two 
gipsy boys walking at its side, urging on the 
rickety old horse. The faces of the women 
once would have brought them to the stake 



w 



3 



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TO GIPSYLAND 141 

for witches ; the boys, with the tumbled black 
locks falling into their eyes, were beautiful in 
that exaggerated, sentimental way that we 
resent as artificial and theatrical in pictures 
of the ideal Neapolitan, while their rags 
seemed more artfully "arranged' than those 
of the best made-up stage beggar. One 
wore a bit of bright red in an old sleeveless 
waistcoat, but it only half covered the beauty 
of his young brown body. We thrilled a 
little as we saw them ; it was exactly the 
caravan that we had thought to find at every 
turn on Hungarian roads. But when we 
overtook them and spoke, they could not 
understand. We did not mind much, we 
were so sure we would meet others like them 
every day now. But they were the only 
wandering gipsies we saw in the northern 
part of Transylvania. 

They told us in the towns, when we asked 
why this should be, that it was rare indeed 
that gipsies traveled from place to place. 
The local laws against them in each depart- 
ment are severe, and when they venture to 
pitch their tents by the roadside, they are 
quickly made to fold them and are sent flying 
into the next county. When they journeyed 



142 



TO GIPSYLAND 



with their baggage, we might be sure it was 
because they were playing a favorite gipsy 
trick, and leaving their last village home just 




FREE AS A BIRD. 



before their stay had been long enough to 
compel their payment of the village taxes. 
Free as the bird in the air no longer : free as 
the bird in the cage, rather, is their song 
to-day. 

It went to our hearts when we passed the 
gipsy women digging in the road near the 



TO GIPSYLAND 



H3 



manor-house ; when from brick-yards gipsy 
girls, with lovely faces, handkerchiefs turned 
back like tur- 
bans over their 
low brows, came 
running out to 
watch us ride ; 
when we found 
gipsy men toil- 
ing in the ser- 
vice of the peas- 
ants — and there 
was not a day 
that we did not 
see something of 
this kind. But 
the worst was 
when we met a gipsy with wild sad eyes, 
and long black curls hanging about his 
weary, drawn face, bent double under the 
bags of a Jew in caftan, who walked just 
behind to see that he did not lag. The sun 
shone, birds flew over the corn-fields, close 
by were woods where one could lie sleeping 
all day in the green shade. But on, in the 
white dust of the road, in the glaring sun- 
shine, toiled the gipsy at the beck and call 
of the taskmaster who already holds half the 




A BRICKMAKER. 



144 



TO GIPSYLAND 



Wallachs in that part of the Karpathians in 
his power. After this, there seemed to us no 




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fa 
O 

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hope for the poor gipsy. And the pitiful 
face, the eyes, mournful and pleading as those 
of an animal in pain, haunt me yet. 

Sometimes we spoke to the gipsies by the 



TO GIPSYLAND 



H5 



r" .\ ■ 



way, and sometimes they answered in Rom- 
any ; it was only the few who, like the 
wanderers on the road near Dees, had forgot- 
ten even the kalo jib, or black language, 
which is half the secret of their survival as a 
separate race during all 
these long ages. Often 
from Hungarian or Rou- 
manian peasant we had 
to turn to them to ask 
our way, and at this they 
were seldom surprised. 
The surprise, indeed, was 
on my part the first time 
I spoke to a woman at 
work on the road in a 
village, with a little black 
girl in a nightgown, many 
shells hanging from her 
plaited hair, and two little 
black boys in nothing at 
all, playing close by. I 
asked her: "Shan tiri 
ckavi, Dya f " ("Are they 
your children, mother ? ") as I might have 
asked Sheva Wharton or Susie Boswell. 

"Egen" (for the Hungarian gipsy uses the 
Hungarian yes)/' miri chavi" (" my children"), 




A LOOK AT THE GORGIOS. 



10 



146 TO GIPSYLAND 

she answered, as if it were a matter of course. 
The truth is, the peasants here and there have 
picked up a few Romany words and are better 
gipsy scholars, without knowing it, than the 
learned Romany Ryes in the town. 

But we liked best, when we knew there 
were so many gipsies apre o drom that we 
could not speak to all, to cry out a loud "Del o 
del Bakk ! " the gipsy " Good luck ! " without 
stopping, and to see the black eyes flash and 
the white teeth glisten as a sudden smile lit 
up the dark faces, and to hear the wild "Del 
o del Bakk / " follow us down the road. 

As we went further and further into the 
country, we learned that there never was a 
yearly, or weekly, market without its gipsies. 
They were there with their baskets or horse- 
shoes or brushes, the men rarely with horses 
to sell, the women often with mops and 
buckets for whitewashing, waiting to be hired. 
And this we did not mind : there was some- 
thing of the pride of race in their clinging to 
trades which had been their forefathers' before 
the first gipsy wandered in Europe, which are 
their brothers' into whatever land they may 
have journeyed. 

In the bewildering costumes filling the mar- 
ket-square, we could never mistake the gipsy. 






Si 

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TO GIPSYLAND 149 

If he wore the peasant dress of the district, 
it was with an additional melodramatic effect 
which made it hard to believe that he was not 
got up for the occasion in theater, or studio, 
properties. But far oftener he wore what has 
come to be the typical costume of the Rouma- 
nian gipsy in Transylvania — the blue Austrian 
infantry tights, ragged after long service at 
first hand, and a blue jacket with silver clasps ; 
perhaps a tall black sheepskin hat; perhaps a 
straw hat, or, as we got further south and 
east, a broad-crowned, wide-brimmed felt with 
cords and tassels. But whatever he wore, his 
dark oval face with its delicate features — the 
sensitive mouth ; the nose something like that 
of the old Assyrian ; the unmistakable eye of 
his people; the fawn-like ears peeping from un- 
der the curls — would have stamped him as the 
stranger he is among the low-browed, swarthy 
Wallachs, the fair, high-cheeked Hungarians, 
the stolid Saxons, and the greasy, cringing 
Jews. And as refined as his face were the long 
slim hands that looked unused to labor, and the 
graceful, shapely limbs. I used to wonder at 
the manly beauty of the Lovells and Stanleys 
at home, but they were commonplace com- 
pared to these wild creatures of the mountains 



15° 



TO GIPSYLAND 




A FINE TYPE. 



and the plains. The youths of sixteen or 
eighteen were beautiful as the archangels or 
Sebastians of the old masters. They needed 
but a nimbus about their perfect heads to be 



TO GIPSYLAND 



151 




ANOTHER TYPE. 



set as they were in the fresco on monastic 
wall, in the altar-piece in cathedral choir. 
And the older men whose beards had grown, 
when, their hats off, you could see the curling 



152 TO GIPSYLAND 

hair parted in the middle, were of such stuffas 
saints and prophets are made. Indeed, in 
more than one, we recognized the Christ of 
modern canvases. The women were less beau- 
tiful, though now and then we wondered at 
a faultless face under the inevitable hand- 
kerchief, and there was less character in their 
dress : they wore, usually, the Roumanian 
aprons. 

But the delicacy of their features, the re- 
finement of their expression, meant nothing. 
They were little better than animals. The 
Sebastians crouched for hours in the sun, their 
arms clasped about their knees, waiting for 
something to turn up. For a pipeful of to- 
bacco, the prophets would pose for J ; 

that is, if they posed at all. Far oftener, when 
they saw what he was about, they would be 
off like a shot, fearful lest their souls might 
become his with their portrait. There was no 
overtaking them ; lightning was in their feet, 
when, straight as arrows and lithe and lean 
as greyhounds, they walked away, cursing in 
deepest Romany. Nothing showed the race 
like this swift stride of theirs. 

As they came into the markets, they always 
looked as if they were genuine travelers on 



TO GIPSYLAND 



153 




LL: 



WAITING FOR SOMETHING TO TURN UP. 



the road, and we used to try and follow them, 
as they left again, to track them to their lair. 
But sometimes the same afternoon we would 
find the wildest in the gipsy quarter of the 



154 



TO GIPSYLAND 



town, or, if we were riding further, we might 
chance upon them in the gipsy huts on the 
outskirts of a wayside village. Their wildness 
meant as little as their beauty. They were 




LEFT AT HOME. 



mere householders like the peasants, and as 
domesticated : in every case the bird in the 
air had been caged. 

We expected less of them after our expe- 
rience with the Beauty of Bethlen, as we 
called him, a marvelous creature with the 
face of an Apollo of the woods and the 
dress of an operatic bandit. We ought to 
have realized how tame he was, for he let 



TO GIPSYLAND 



155 



J 



— make a sketch of him where we found 
him, bargaining for odd pieces of broken china 
in the market-place of the town near Dees. 
But, the sketch finished, he refused the 




SEEN IN DEES. 



tobacco J offered, and asked for money. 

As we ate our midday dinner, we fancied him 
getting uproariously drunk in the nearest 
wine-shop, before he staggered off to his 
lonely tent in the hills. It is certainly what 



156 TO GIPSYLAND 

he would have done had he been the gipsy 
he looked. But a couple of hours later, on 
our bicycles, we passed him walking along 
the highway, holding a little girl by one hand, 
carrying in the other a large piece of meat. 
By that time my gipsy would have had out 
his violin and been playing himself into 
ecstasy. True, they were not all so sober as 
this model father of a family. We had not 
left him far behind, when we rode through a 
village where a large colony of gipsies had 
settled, and there was not a man, or woman, 
of them who was not gay with wine. The 
prophets were bawling discordantly in their 
cottages. When we stopped, women ran up 
to us, and, in the white road, danced about 
us, ringing our bicycle-bells and chanting 
strange wild snatches of song, like so many 
bacchantes. We ought to have liked them, 
I suppose, but they were too drunk. The 
prophets staggered out at the noise and 
wanted to fight. 

No town or village was without this gipsy 
quarter. In giving up the free life, the Rom- 
anies have not lost that unerring instinct 
which leads them to make their home always 
where there is most beauty. If willows hung 



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W 




TO GIPSYLAND 159 

low over the stream from the mountains as it 
flowed, cold and fast, by the village, there 
were the gipsy homes, with gipsies sleep- 
ing, the naked boys and girls playing in the 
sun. Or, if the town began to climb a hill 
that looked westward or over the valley with 
the river winding through it, there, too, were 
the cottages of the dark-browed sons and 
daughters of the far East ; as at Dees, where, 
strolling past them one afternoon, a door 
opened suddenly, and down the road, out of 
the town and far away, danced men and 
women, stamping and twirling in the dust, 
three gipsies close behind playing on old 
cracked fiddles. 

It was at the end of the first week of our 
journey, by the time we reached Bestercze, 
the little Saxon town, almost in the Bukovina, 
with German signs on all the shops and Ger- 
man student caps on all the boys, and flaxen 
pigtails on all the peasant girls, that we gave 
up hope of meeting the real gipsy traveling 
on the road. We thought, perhaps, that if we 
explored the byways we might be more suc- 
cessful, and for a week or more we made the 
quiet town our headquarters: wandering from 
it, sometimes on foot, up and down the near 



160 TO GIPSYLAND 

hills in the cloudless September sunshine; fol- 
lowing the course of the willow-veiled stream, 
where in America we should have seen the 
blue smoke among the trees ; racing across the 
wide fields in the twilight, when in the distance 
we caught a glimpse of a man leading horses 
to water. But never were there any gipsies. 

Then we took our bicycles and wheeled to 
remote, unknown, unpronounceable villages 
far from railways ; stopping in the shade of 
the broad street as the peasants in brilliant 
dress gathered about us, always the dark- 
robed Jew in their midst, and asking: " Are 
there gipsies in the country near ? ' Or else we 
rode high up into the mountains of the Buko- 
vina, over the wild passes where we met no 
one but the shepherd with his black-faced 
sheep, and gendarmes with their guns, or, 
now and then, when, with a new thrill we 
hurried in pursuit of the trail of smoke, road- 
menders cooking their dinners. But never 
were there any gipsies. 

In the villages we found them, and once in 
a village of their own. We were coming 
from the Bukovina, and as we coasted down 
the mountain-side, between the trees, a turn 
of the road showed us the great plain where 



H 
X 



> 
o 



o 
a 

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H 

X 
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ii 



TO GIPSYLAND 163 

Bestercze lies far below. Just at the foot of 
the mountain, on a solitary hilltop, was a 
group of huts. There was no road to it, and 
over the stubble we pushed our bicycles, then 
up through the bushes. A bitter cold wind 
was blowing down the hills behind us, and at 
first no one was about. But from the huts 
they began to come, men in blue soldier 
tights, women in Roumanian aprons, children 
in their own pretty brown skins, black pigs 
running at their side. Wretchedly forlorn and 
poor it all looked. The huts, thatched with 
branches of trees from the near forest, weeds 
and wild flowers growing on top, one or two 
with a tiny cross at the highest point, were so 
low we wondered how a full-grown person 
could stand upright within them ; the men's 
shirts were ragged ; the women were bare- 
foot, though about their necks were full 
twenty ducats upon their Sunday necklace, 
as the Roumanian girl sings, beautiful silver 
coins of the last century. 

But the huts inside were fairly comfortable. 
Though there was not one gipsy word among 
the colony, the tdcho Romany was stamped 
upon their faces, came out in their work, — 
the women were making baskets, — and, 



164 



TO GIPSYLAND 



above all, showed itself in the grace of their 
hospitality. Now that I was no longer riding, 
I shivered in my linen blouse, and an old 
Dye, seeing this, took me by the hand and 




IN THE VILLAGE NEAR BESTERCZE. 



led me into her hut : the branches of the trees 
were woven over a small porch, or ante- 
chamber, where two pretty girls sat weaving 
their baskets. The real living-room was 
beyond, and here they had gone burrowing 
so deep into the ground that it was twice as 
high as it looked from without. There was a 
soft bed with many pillows on one side, white 
skirts and aprons hung in a line above, and 
opposite, ears of corn made a golden frieze, 



TO GIPSYLAND 165 

while a good fire burned in the corner. We 
sat down together on the floor, the old Dye 
and I. She wanted to make me a cake out 
of the golden corn-meal ; she offered me a 
cream-cheese, then an apple, and as I still 
shook my head, she peeled and quartered it, 
and when again I refused, she threatened to 
throw it in the flames, so that I was shamed 
into eating it, though with every mouthful I 
felt that I was robbing her. I am not sure 
that it was the apple that made the lump in 
my throat. How often had I rested like this 
by the fire, drinking tea with the Costelloes 
and the Whartons. If the gipsy knows you 
for a friend, he is not happy until he has 
given you something, no matter what, like 
that untamed Romany of Badajos who flung 
down his bursting pomegranate on the table 
before Borrow. 

The Dye, in her pretty Roumanian apron, 
the coins about her withered neck, was no 
greater curiosity to me than I to her. She 
examined my boots, my blue serge skirt, my 
blouse, and then, coming at last to my hat, 
she for the first time noticed that my ears 
were bare to the biting wind. In a flash she 
snatched the orange handkerchief from her 



1 66 TO GIPSYLAND 

gray hair, and had almost tied it over my 
head before I could stop her. 

This gipsy village was in a desolate place 
far from the road. The men looked like so 
many brigands ; there were daggers in their 
belts. They could have taken our every pen- 
ny, and have done with us what they wanted; 
we were defenseless, powerless, in their hands. 
But they received us as friends, with a 
courtesy that made our thanks seem boorish. 
They brought us food; they would have given 
us the clothes they wore had we let them. 
And these are the people who are being 
hunted and hounded from their old haunts in 
the green forest and by the quiet stream, of 
whom the only stories one hears are of the 
descent upon the farm-yard at night, the un- 
guarded clothes-line by day ; who are set- 
tled, and housed, and taxed, until they need 
but the visit of the extension lecturer and the 
patronage of the amateur missionary to com- 
plete their degradation. And when winter 
comes on the hilltop, and on every side snow 
lies white on the plain and on the mountains, 
the gipsy must stay there, half frozen, half 
starved, though were he free to live his own 
life he would long since, with the birds, have 



X 

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TO GIPSYLAND 169 

flown to a land where it is always summer. 
And who would have been the worse for his 
flight ? 

And of what use to him is this show of civ- 
ilization ? He is no less poor than when he 
roamed, without let or hindrance, from one 
end of Hungary to the other ; he is dirtier now 
that each day, each week, or at least each 
month, does not bring him to a fresh green 
spot by running river or unsullied spring. 
And his morals! — he has not gained much 
more than the Red Indian who bartered his 
old fierce independence for the fire-water of 
the white settler. Once, when men were 
little less savage than the brutes, it was best 
that the many were tamed ; but to-day, that 
the many are modeled after one peaceful pat- 
tern, why not spare the few who still feel the 
true poetry of life, who still love "the tent 
pitched beside the talking water, the stars 
overhead at night, the blest return of morn- 
ing, the peep of day over the moors, the 
awaking birds among the birches " ? Who 
would want to turn every lark and blue- 
jay, every oriole and nightingale, into the 
little twittering brown sparrow of our town 
gardens ? 



lyo 



TO GIPSYLAND 



But there was something more than free- 
dom missing from the life of these gipsies, 
whose beautiful faces and fantastic dress went 




THE SWINEHERD. 



so far beyond our dreaming. And this some- 
thing was the music which we had hoped to 
hear as we wandered over the hills and 
through the forests. In only one or two 
cottages had we seen the violin hanging on 





I 



172 TO GIPSYLAND 

the wall, though in the picture-galleries of 
Budapest it was common enough in the Rom- 
any hut ; only once or twice as on that gay 
afternoon in Dees, or now and then at mar- 
kets in the smaller villages, did we listen to 

. o-t eu Romanies play, and then, as 

musicians, they were no bet- 
ter than the fiddler in many 
an out-of-the-way English 




hamlet — than the old darky 
of the Southern plantation. 
I do not mean that there 
was never any music at all. 
in dees. j n t h e little Transylvanian 

towns, as in Budapest, we could go nowhere 
in the evening toward the sunset hour with- 
out hearing the sad wail or loud frenzy of the 
Czardas ; and when we followed the sound, 
as we always did, it led us either to the wine- 
cellar of the peasant, or to the restaurant of the 
large hotel, or once, in Dees, to a pretty park 
where people were walking up and down the 
shady paths, while the sun set in splendor to 
the playing of the gipsies. And how they 
played in the warm September evening, until 
the gloaming faded into twilight, and the 
twilight deepened into night ! The people, 



TO GIPSYLAND 



173 




THE REAL GIPSY BEGGAR. 



mere shadows in the darkness, gradually left 
the park, but still the Czardas rang- out loud 
and fierce, or low and sweet in the silent night. 
There were no lights save the stars above, 
and at times the red glow of a cigarette in the 
band-stand. I suppose they were paid by the 
town or somebody for coming there, but they 



174 TO GIPSYLAND 

seemed to have lost themselves in their music, 
to be making it for their own pleasure alone. 
If we had only found them thus with their 
violins by the roadside ! 

All these gipsies, however, belong to an 
entirely different class from those who haunt 
the markets and dress like the peasants. 
"We have a trade — our music!" they often 
told us ; " the Tzigan you meet on the road, 
whose children run naked, has nothing; he is 
a beggar." And to mark the distinction, they 
have long since cut off their curls, and put away 
their silver buttons, and are doing their best 
to look like the average Hungarian or Wal- 
lach of the town. Those very men who had 
lingered so lovingly over their violins in the 
park at Dees, when they saw us later in the 
hotel, struck up " God save the Queen ! ' It 
was some comfort that they had not yet got 
so far as " Yankee Doodle." 

But, after we spoke to them, there was no 
more " God save the Queen " ; there was 
nothing but the music of their own people, 
nothing but the Cz&rdas and the waltzes 
played to us of old at the Mannerchor. It 
was a further mark of their demoralization 
that only two knew any Romany — the man 



TO GIPSYLAND 



175 



WF* 






mm 




who played the bass viol and the servant of 
the cymbal-player; for few gipsy bands are 
without a ''slavey," a gipsy too, who carries 
the heavier in- 
struments and m 
runs errands, 
but whom the 
musicians treat 
as one of them- 
selves, and who, 
probably, is 
working out in 
service a debt 
to his own peo- 
ple, according 
to the old Rom- 
any custom. It 
was funny at 
Dees to watch 

this creature going out to buy cake for the 
cymbal-player, — they are all very like chil- 
dren, — and then sharing it with him on his 
return. But if they could not speak Romany 
themselves, they liked our being able to talk 
it, and they came and sat with us at our table, 
and begged us to stop next at Bestercze : the 
gipsies there spoke nothing else in their own 
homes. 



*.'.•' ■'::'■ ■' 



A VAGABOND. 



176 TO GIPSYLAND 

And to Bestercze, as I have said, we went. 
When I look back on our evenings in its 
little hotels, at the end of those long days 
of hopeless hunting after the real gipsy, I 
scarce know whether I feel most like laugh- 
ing or crying. For if there was much that 
was gay in our friendship with the musicians 
we met here, their life, as we saw it, seemed 
as bitter to bear as that of the begging gipsy 
they despised. 

We were friends at the first word of Rom- 
any. They did not accept it with the indif- 
ference of the gipsy in the brick-yard and the 
market ; nor did they wonder why, knowing 
so much, we still could say so little. They 
had tried to talk with Turkish gipsies, but, 
as with us, though the words were the same, 
they could not keep up a conversation: it 
was the fault of the grammar, they explained. 
Besides, the Archduke Joseph had sent his 
great book on the Romany language to Go- 
ghi Karoly, the leader, and in it they had 
learned that the gipsy speaks in many dif- 
ferent dialects. 

It was especially to see this book and the 
Archduke's signature that Goghi, so jaunty 
in his soft green hat and feather, invited us 



TO GIPSYLAND 



177 



to his house in the little street near the 
mill-stream. We sat in the one large room, 
with the white and red pillows piled high on 




A CELLO-PLAYER. 



the bed in the corner, while he read long 
passages to us, and his pretty young wife, an 
orange handkerchief tied over her black hair, 
looked on, and one by one other dark-eyed, 



12 



178 TO GIPSYLAND 

dark-browed gipsies strayed in, and sat 
down on the floor to listen. What a re- 
ception they gave us in the sunny street af- 
terward ! The men working at the forge 
stopped to come and talk; the old Dyes hob- 
bled out from their houses ; the children, just 
from school, their books under their arms, 
were brought and introduced to us. They 
said, and I know the pleasant fiction will be 
forgiven them, that my Romany was better 
than theirs. And as we strolled back toward 
the hotel, they kept by our side under the 
trees along the shady walk around the old 
fortifications. 

There was no question of their pleasure in 
being with us. In the evening they would 
leave violins to gather round our table, until 
the landlord, who had been amiability itself 
when we first came, turned his back upon us 
in undisguised disgust. It was then we dis- 
covered that, in Hungary, you must be an 
archduke before you can associate with the 
gipsy without losing caste. Once they took 
up their violins, again the music was all for 
us, not only their tacho Romany gillis, wild 
and savage as the song we had heard in the 
Budapest villa on the Blocksberg, but even 



TO GIPSYLAND 179 

the Hungarian melodies which made the offi- 
cers, who overcrowded Bestercze, weep in mer- 
riment, and squander their ten- and twenty- 
kreutzer pieces with wild recklessness. The 
collection here, as in the capital, was the in- 
evitable accompaniment of the gipsy concert. 
Goghi, or Janos, the second violin, went 
around with the plate as regularly as Racz 
Pal at the Hungaria, and the weeping officers 
were forced to pay for the luxury of tears. 
But to our table he never came; that is 
why I say the music always was for us. Not 
from the Romany brother from overseas must 
money be asked in return for pleasure. 
If we called to Janos to say a word as he 

passed, if Goghi stopped to glance at J 's 

sketch of himself, the plate was held by both 
hands behind his back out of our reach. 

This touched us the more because Bes- 
tercze is small, and few people were in the 
hotels and cafes except the officers, who could 
afford the gipsy music only at rare intervals. 

What could we do ? If J sent them 

wine as they played, so did the officers. It 
made me think with a sigh of those Manner- 
chor nights when Herr Josef, with velvet coat 
and flashing opals, ordered beer for us. And 



180 TO GIPSYLAND 

yet the Hungarian will tell you that the 
gipsies care only for money. When they 
passed us by, the plate behind their backs, 
we remembered the cruel story of the Rom- 
any, with one half the gulden note stuck on 
his forehead, compelled to play until it fell off 
before he could have the other; of that stupid 
libel of the leader made by his own men to 
carry a fly in his left hand, that when he 
came back with the collection they could be 
sure if he had helped himself. Stories and 
libels all! We now know the gipsy better. 
But it was on the evenings when they did 
not play that we felt the bitterness of their 
life most keenly. There was less sadness in 
their saddest Czardas than in the dark faces 
peering into the dining-room to see whether 
people were there to listen to their music. 
And inexpressibly mournful was the way they 
waited, listless and silent, in an outer room 
in hopes they might be wanted. Had they 
not played so well it would have seemed less 
hard. But in their violins was ever the swing, 
the wild rhythm, that we so seldom heard 
from the more prosperous Tzigans of Buda- 
pest. They asked, with pathetic eagerness, 
what prospect of success there was for them 



TO GIPSYLAND 



181 



in America or England. Only this winter 
has Domby Karoly failed hopelessly in Lon- 
don, so that I am glad we gave little encour- 




l°T&WHjJc. 



THE CAMP OF WAGONS. 



agement. A passing fad they might be, as 
Wagner is to-day, as Liszt was yesterday, — 
but how many would really understand, would 
really care, for their Czardas? We promised 
a better chance if they came in the beautiful 
dress of the Roumanian gipsy, with long curls 
flowing, and belts stuck full of daggers over 
their loose white shirts. But they said : 
"We are musicians, not mountebanks.*' 



12" 



182 TO GIPSYLAND 

No; there was no real gipsy in, or near, 
Bestercze. It was useless to stay. There 
were but poverty and misery on that lonely 
hilltop, but misery and poverty in the pretty 
street by the mill-stream. 

We started once more on our search. We 
wandered far and long over the hills, now 
clothed in all their autumn pomp of gold and 
scarlet and bronze, meeting the huge timber- 
wagons, with the little tented huts on top, 
where the men slept all day, pulled slowly 
down by three horses abreast, or else drawn 
up, in the clearing at the foot of the pass, for 
the night's camp. We crossed the broad up- 
lands that stretch from range to range, where 
the sleepy oxen and peasants at the plow 
crept, white and shining, through the somber 
fields, and the women astride their white 
horses, and the men in their low wicker carts, 
and the crowds on foot, were going to, or 
coming from, the markets. We set out in the 
morning when the mountains were flushed 
with the first rosy light of dawn ; and we 
rode late into the twilight, coming to the last 
town or village of our day's journey, as men 
were watering their weary horses at the wells, 
and the long procession of white cows and 



X 

B 

O 
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B 

en 

M 
> 

W 

o 

CO 
N 




TO GIPSYLAND 185 

black buffaloes, and pigs and sheep, and geese 
and goats, went homeward in clouds of dust 
from their pasture-land. 

We wandered eastward, almost into Mol- 
davia; to Borszek, the famous springs, now 
closed and deserted, for the season was over; 
to Gyergyo Szent Miklos and Toplicza, where 
the Armenians live; down the wild course of 
the Maros as it falls swiftly through dense 
pine forests, where again we met gipsies on 
the road ; and between great cliffs, where in 
caves we saw others who live there, savage 
and without music. 

We strayed into the very heart of Szekler- 
land, from Maros Vasarhely to Szekely Ud- 
varhely and Csik Szereda and Sepsi Szent 
Gyergyo, those towns with the awful names, 
where men proudly call themselves Szeklers, 
and claim to be sons of the oldest Huns of all 
who followed Attila on his lawless raids ; and 
where, less often than anywhere else in that 
land of music, did the song of the violin hold 
us spellbound in the evening; where, less 
beautiful than anywhere else in that land 
of beauty, was the dress of the people by 
the way. 

We lingered in the country of the Saxons: 



i86 



TO GIPSYLAND 



in Schassburg, with its fortress and church- 
crowned hill ; in Kronstadt, with mountains 
on every side rising from its streets ; in Herr- 




«\ 



IN THE MOUNTAINS BY BORSZEK. 



manstadt, with its great breweries and Bier 
Kellars ; in the country, whose blond men 
and women are not a whit less German in 
face and speech and custom than were their 
forefathers, who came and settled here so 
many centuries ago ; where the towns, with 
their towers and spires and turrets, are like 
bits of the Fatherland ; where the little vil- 
lages, each with its fortified church, speak 
eloquently of the long years when they 



TO GIPSYLAND 



187 




GETTING DINNER. 



and their people were at the mercy of the 
Turk. 

We came back again to Magyarland, at 
Gyula Fehervar and Torda and Koloszvar, 
far eastward, where corn now ripens and 
grapes grow sweet on plains and hillsides 



i88 



TO GIPSYLAND 



watered by the blood of Magyars but yester- 
day, when the Wallachs, at their very doors, 
rose and massacred them, women and chil- 




ON THE ROAD. 



dren as well as men, in that hideous revolt 
of the lesser against the greater race. 

The Wallachs have no one special part 
of Transylvania to themselves. But in the 
land of Szeklers and Saxons and Magyars 
alike, — from the mountains of Marmaros to 
the heights of their own Roumania, from 
the valley of the Maros to the banks of the 



TO GIPSYLAND 



189 



Szamos, — -wherever we went, we found them 
more picturesque in face and costume than 
the other peasants, and, to us, kinder and 
friendlier. It is only in rare moments of 
madness that the daggers at their belts, as 
in the Roumanian ballad, thirst for blood. 

And the real gipsy ? We were as far from 
him as ever. Those perfect Sebastians, those 
wild-eyed prophets, still smiled as they threw 
their "Del del Bakkf" after us down the 



/■V ■■.'.■:■ : '-. ",■■-■<■>'■<■■■■■.■■ 




HIS ONLY FIRESIDE. 






hot white road ; the musicians still played in 
restaurant and cafe, not for pleasure, but for 
money, though from us never would they 



190 TO GIPSYLAND 

take a kreutzer once we had spoken a word 
of Romany. But for the gipsy, free as the 
deer in the forest, as the bird in the air, alone 
with his violin, his music the breath of life to 
him, we scoured the country in vain. Not a 
day passed without its Romany adventure. 
Now it was the hour spent resting by the forge 
of the blacksmith, now the meeting with a 
grisly old hag who stopped us to tell our 
fortune, but who, when I said that I too was a 
bori chovihani (a great witch), stayed to talk 
to friends. Again, it was only the radiant smile 
and soft latcho divvus of a pretty boy idling in 
the sun, or of a little naked brown girl sitting 
at a cabin door. And once in a long while 
we met a family on the march crossing the 
mountains with cart and horses, or hanging 
up the kettle by the road, their only fireside. 

But when I think of that long, lovely 
autumn, certain days stand out with greater 
vividness because of the strangeness of the 
adventure, or its rarer beauty. One was the 
happy Sunday when, late in the golden 
September afternoon and in a remote moun- 
tain village, we came upon Wallachs dancing 
on a tiny green by the church, to the music 
of two gipsies in peasant dress, with the tails 



H 
X 

w 
o 

> 

> 

as 

> 

O 

w 




! 



TO GIPSYLAND 193 

of their white shirts sticking out like little 
skirts below their sleeveless jackets. Every- 
thing the people did in this half-eastern land, 
even their hardest work, had the same unreal 
effect, and suggested footlights rather than the 
open day. But no spectacle they presented 
was quite as theatrical as the Sunday dance 
on the village green. Had we seen it on the 
stage, we should have pronounced it over- 
done, so great was the excess of costume. 
Spangles and tinsel glittered on the aprons of 
the girls ; row upon row of gold and silver 
and scarlet beads hung about their necks ; 
long ribbons streamed from their plaited hair; 
the tip of a peacock's feather, or a flower, 
was stuck in their gorgeous handkerchiefs 
over each ear. Large bunches of peacock- 
feathers were in the men's hats, their wide 
belts were studded close with brass, bells 
around their boots pealed at every movement. 
Two by two they walked around the green, 
holding themselves and taking their steps 
with a stateliness and grace rarely surpassed 
by the professional dancer ; and then suddenly 
they began twirling, the white skirts and 
aprons of the girls flying and showing all 

their high red boots, the men now and then 

13 



194 



TO GIPSYLAND 



throwing back their heads and singing mild 
snatches of improvised song. Once or twice 




o 
z 

HH 
hJ 
Pi 

< 
O 

w 

> 

W 

K 
H 

c 

Q 
& 



a girl smiled, but it was mostly a solemn per- 
formance, like a mystic dance sacred to the 



w 

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I— I 

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TO GIPSYLAND 197 

gods, and there was an impressive Oriental 
monotony in the tune they danced to, cracked 
though the fiddles of the gipsies were. We 
stood looking with the people of the village, 
a Roumanian woman's arm about my waist, 
while the sun sank and the moon rose beyond 
the bank of trees behind the dancers; and 
we left them there, twirling and singing in 
the silver moonlight, like the Phrygian girls 
whom the summer evening of old saw 

Flashing in the dance's whirls 
Underneath the starlit trees 
In the mountain villages. 

Afterward, we saw Saxons dancing, but it 
was in a stuffy room, and the perspiration 
streamed from their broad, stolid faces, and 
the floor shook under their heavy, clumsy feet 
as they turned in an ordinary waltz, while the 
Saxon band, in sheepskins, blew pert, jerky 
airs hard into loud, brazen horns. And when 
twilight came, oil-lamps were lit and the 
atmosphere grew rank and suffocating. All 
the poetry was with the Wallachs, whose ball- 
room was the open green, and the lights they 
danced to, the setting sun and the full harvest 

moon. 
13* 



198 



TO GIPSYLAND 



Another of these days that will live longest 
in our memory was passed at Maros Vasarhely 
with Dr. Herrmann, the gipsy scholar from 







AN INVALID. 



Budapest, visiting among the gipsy huts on 
the hillside, where old men dozed in the 
sun and children played games in hopes of 
kreutzers, and women cooked their dinners 
while naked babies tumbled about them, and 
one poor dying man with eyes, brown and 
pathetic as a setter's when you beat it, and a 
shock of black hair shading them, lay motion- 
less and silent among the chattering women 
at his cottage door. It was on the same day 



H 
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t- 1 




m 






<-5> 



V f » - : N 



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TO GIPSYLAND 



20I 



too that we met the three Romanies, in the 
rags of Callot's beggars, whom we followed 
into a bank, where the polite superintendent 




TALKING OVER THINGS. 



and cashiers suspended all business, while one 
of the wanderers sang a gipsy song for Dr. 

Herrmann, and J sketched a second, who 

had a face like an angel, but who groveled in 
the dust to kiss our feet in thanks for a few 
kreutzers and a half-smoked cigar. The won- 
der was to see them in such a place; but after 
they had gone the superintendent took us into 
a near room and showed us the silver cups they 



202 TO GIPSYLAND 

had brought to pawn, and then shelf after shelf 
full of other cups, all beautiful in design, many 
dating back to the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries. There is no gipsy family in Tran- 
sylvania without one ; pawn it they may, and 
do often enough, but no matter how sore 
their straits, they never sell it. It is a super- 
stition with them, and they would rather sell 
themselves. Then, who could explain how it 
happened that, in the private carriage of a 
man we had never seen before, we drove out 
in the hot noontide sunshine — " Nous trots 
Bohemiens ! " as Dr. Herrmann said with a 
laugh — between the fields, to the country 
house of people we knew no better, where, 
though the midday meal was just over, a din- 
ner was cooked for us, and fresh horses were 
harnessed to a new carriage, and we were 
driven to a gipsy village? Who could ex- 
plain it who does not know something of 
the Hungarian courtesy and kindness to the 
stranger? We could not be allowed to go 
fasting from the Hungarian's house, and as we 
were more interested in Romanies than any- 
thing else, odd as our fancy seemed, the Rom- 
anies were produced for us. But the visit to 
the village was formal and profitless ; the 



TO GIPSYLAND 



203 



people eyed us from a respectful distance. 
The real gipsy was not apt to show himself 
to " carriage folk." 

A third of our rare days I count that at the 
horse- and cattle-fair in an unknown wayside 




ON THE MARCH. 



town. All morning the road was full of long- 
haired gipsies riding to it with their horses, 
the first we had seen following the trade of 
the American Lovells and Whartons ; many 
were resting in the inn where we halted for an 
early glass of beer and bread. When at noon 
we wandered over the broad meadows, there 
under the willows by the river were tents, — 



204 



TO GIPSYLAND 



real tents this time, — and in front, little girls 
in coarse white nightgowns, their plaited hair 
full of shells and coins, for kreutzers from the 
gorgios made cart-wheels in the short, parched 

h t,f Mil 
1 




A TALK IN A TAVERN. 



grass, and danced, swaying their bodies as in 
the danse du ventre, crouching on the ground, 
still swaying backward and forward, beating 
their little breasts. Beyond the tents were 
the horses and cows and pigs and peasants, 
and almost every other man was a Romany 
with the face of a Christ and the whine of a 




> 
O 

I— c 

•z 
o 

X 
o 

po 

CO 

w 

CO 



lllll^llllli 
HI.'— ' v ' ; 




TO GIPSYLAND 



207 



beggar ; a few were prosperous farmers, and 
one, in the dress of the Wallach, showed me 



' " '*a 




A FLIRTATION AT THE FAIR. 



his cattle and asked about the Romany chals 
in our country. I remember him because he 
was the only gipsy of his class who seemed 
interested in his people who had jailed pardel 



208 TO GIPSYLAND 

o pani (gone over the water). As we went 
on in the afternoon, we overtook more 
Tzigans traveling with all their chattels on 
their horses, the long tent-poles trailing be- 
hind like an Indian's on the march, the men 
drunk and happy and singing, the women 
scolding at their sides, the children and the 
dogs running on before. 

With October these cattle-fairs and yearly 
markets began to be held in every town and 
village, and many a morning we awoke to see 
the square beneath our windows packed solid 
with booths and people ; many a noon we 
came into a tiny village to find it all confu- 
sion and merriment. One afternoon we rode 
away from Brasso, from the market there. 
For hours we had strolled around its pretty 
old town hall, where eminently respectable 
gipsies stood selling their iron horseshoes, 
and dark Romany women sat selling their 
wooden spoons and brushes. At first, now, 
the road was crowded with people starting 
for home, looking as tired as their oxen, 
which stepped along sedately at snail's pace, 
so that we outdistanced them all quickly on 
the great plain. In the brown fields peas- 
ants, bent double, were at work. The sun 






H 
X 
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g 

> 

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H 

I 

I* 

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> 
m 
en 




r 4 



TO GIPSYLAND 



211 



was shining, the sky was blue, the air was 
sweet with the fragrance of the fresh-turned 
earth, but men and women were too busy 




THE FAIR. 



at their endless labors to know or care. The 
mountains of Fogaras were still shadowy on 
the horizon, when, by the roadside, in the 
middle of the plain, we came upon an old 
gipsy, in the white shirt and trousers of the 
Wallach, sitting in the grass, playing on his 
violin. There was no one near : he was 
playing to the sun and to the birds and to 



2i2 TO GIPSYLAND 

himself. When he heard us, he stood up 
and went on fiddling in the dusty road, his 
eyes dancing, his feet keeping time. We 
stopped to listen to his poor crazy tune, ex- 
pecting every minute that he would beg. 
But presently he pulled off his hat, made a 
low bow, turned, and walked away with the 
graceful swing of the race, an erect white 
figure in the white road, fiddling as he went. 
A wagon passed us, and the peasants in it, 
overtaking him, made him jump in at their 
side. When we rode on again, he was sitting 
by the driver, still fiddling, the only man in 
all that broad plain, dotted with its Millet-like 
toilers, who was idle and heedless of to-day 
and the morrow ! 

October is the vintage month in the wine- 
gardens of the east of Transylvania, and it 
is upon the shining days when we roamed 
amongst the vines, feasting on grapes, that 
my memory dwells the longest. It was only 
for the ending of the vintage that we reached 
the little Saxon town of Muhlbach, with the 
old broken walls still encircling it, and the 
beautiful fortified church still overlooking its 
central square. The sun had set, and the 
church spire and the line of poplars rose black 



W 

W 
pa 

w 
o 
H 

o 





14" 



TO GIPSYLAND 



215 




THE RETURN FROM THE FAIR. 



against the red of the afterglow as the town 
came in sight ; and from the fields to our 
right, where the full harvest moon was rising, 
wound the long procession of ox-teams, each 
with its wine-cask decked with vine-leaves, 



216 TO GIPSYLAND 

and its white peasant leading the white oxen. 
Men wrapped in their sheepskins sat leaning 
against the casks, blowing loud and sweet on 
their pipes ; and children, lagging behind, 
were still gorging themselves with the golden 
grapes. The hotel was crowded with wine- 
merchants and wandering peddlers, and in 
the restaurant there was not an empty seat, 
and the balls on the billiard-table in the mid- 
dle of the room never stopped clicking. A 
gipsy band played all evening. The next 
morning the square was besieged with beg- 
ging Romanies from remote villages, and 
well-to-do farming Tzigans from the country 
with cattle and pigs to sell. One man, tall 
and spare, with keen eyes flashing from the 
tangle of black curls that framed his long, 
thin face, was pointed out to us as the Voi- 
vode. But what a degenerate gipsy king ! 
— a mere farmer, like the peasants. 

In Mlihlbach, the grapes were all picked, 
the juice all crushed from out their sun- 
ripened clusters. But for the beginning of 
the vintaee we rode in time into near Peters- 
dorf, where not a soul was in the street of the 
tiny village: men, women, and children had 
gone to the wine-gardens. In the meadows 



n 
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W 

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2 
M 

6 

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- T"""a 



TO GIPSYLAND 



219 



the white oxen rested under the trees, in the 
vines the white peasants came and went, 
emptying their overflowing baskets into the 
yawning wine-cask ; and as we passed they 



!''„'. 




THREE GENTLEMEN OF MUHLBACH. 



ran out to fill our hands with huge bunches 
of grapes. Two dark Romany dials, in loose 
shirts and broad Wallachian belts, were fid- 
dling in the fields; men were firing off guns 
on the sunny hillside. It was a simple, merry 
scene. The vineyards were small; they be- 
longed to peasant proprietors. 



220 TO GIPSYLAND 

For beginning and ending alike, from the 
time the first grapes were thrown in the tubs 
and baskets, until the full casks were stowed 
away in dark, cool cellars, we were at Gyula 
Fehervar, or Karlsburg, as the Saxons call 
it. The amber Riesling is made on the 
sunny slopes that rise from the far side of 
the meadows beyond the town. We walked 
out toward them in the cool of the early 
morning, under the shadow of the high for- 
tress, with the cathedral and campanile-like 
tower springing aloft above the triple walls, 
the burial-place of Hunyadi Janos and his son 
Ladislaus. Soldiers, in the blue infantry tights, 
were drilling just below, and the air was full 
of the call of bugles and the hated rccht, links 
ems of the Austrian commands. Across the 
fields, from every direction, crept the ox- 
teams, followed by groups of peasants. Al- 
ready in the wine-gardens the work had be- 
gun: the unyoked oxen lay in the pleasant 
shade; carts with the wine-casks set in them 
were drawn up here and there in a little open 
space; the white figures went to and fro 
among the vines; there was a buzz of voices 
from every side, and now and then snatches 
of song. Up and down the broad alleyways 






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TO GIPSYLAND 



223 



through the vineyards we strayed, the sun 
burning us with fiercer heat as it rose higher 
and higher, the warmth and the scents of 
summer everywhere on the busy hillside. At 




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THE WANDERING MUSICIANS IN THE WINE-GARDENS. 



each vineyard we were laden with a fresh 
burden of grapes, and we ate them as we 
went, flinging bunch after bunch to the beg- 
ging gipsy children who romped at our heels. 
Long before noon, a man with loose white 
trousers rolled high above his knees was 
jumping in every wine-cask, the juice in rich 



224 



TO GIPSYLAND 




THE MIDDAY MEAL DURING THE VINTAGE. 



reddish streams falling into the buckets set 
below. At noon, the smoke from many camp- 
kettles rose above the vines, and mingling 
with the sweet summer scents was the smell 
of the midday gulyas. 

As we passed the large vineyards, we saw 
in the little white house of the guardian a 



TO GIPSYLAND 



225 



banquet spread, and around the table one of 
the gipsy bands from the hotel of the town 
stood playing. But at the smaller vineyards 



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the cloth was laid on the grass, or on a table 
under a rude shed, and here Romanies, in 
peasant dress, from the near villages were fid- 



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226 



TO GIPSYLAND 



dling away under the trees, as men, pressing 
the grapes in the casks, danced wildly to the 
music, throwing their brown, grape-stained 







THE PLAY IN THE WINE-GARDENS. 



arms above their heads, as they danced in 
the days long dead, when Gyula Fehervar 
was still Colonia Apulensis. 

In Tuscany, when we had gone to the vin- 
tage, the peasants pressed the wines inside 
dark, gloomy cellars ; in Provence, the land 
of sunburnt mirth, the grapes were crushed 
by steam in brand-new buildings with all the 
latest modern improvements. It was only in 



TO GIPSYLAND 



227 



Transylvania that we found the peasants dan- 
cing in the old, glad, free fashion of classic days, 
out in the sunshine to the sound of music. 

We threw ourselves under the shade of a 
near tree to watch. But a woman rose from 




PLAYING IN THE WINE-GARDENS. 



where she was dining, and bade the gip- 
sies sit down near her. Then she brought 
them plates piled high with bread and grapes, 
and, seeing us fasting when all the world 
was feasting, filled other plates with her 



228 TO GIPSYLAND 

bread and grapes, and carried them to us. 
We refused at first: we had been eating 
grapes all morning, we gave for reason. 
" But you must not go away and say that 
from the Roumanian woman you have taken 
nothing ! ' was her answer, and she placed 
the plates between us on the grass. A dark, 
swarthy Tzigan was lying full length on the 
reddening leaves beyond, and into the basket 
at his side she dropped two or three golden 
clusters as she passed. He had been doing 
nothing; while peasants, and even many of 
his own people, had been cutting bunch after 
bunch from the heavily laden vines, he had 
been enjoying the light of the sun, now 
stretched on his back on the crisp, warm 
turf, now lingering to jest with his toiling 
kinsmen; and yet his basket was full to the 
brim of the choicest grapes from every vine- 
yard. 

And so the afternoon wore on, peasants 
dancing as they pressed the wine, or working 
gaily among the vines and feasting on the 
fruit ; gipsies playing, every now and then a 
mad couple twirling round and round on the 
smooth grass ; smiling Wallachs begging us 
to taste the new wine ; even the children in 



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TO GIPSYLAND 231 

the nuns' garden pirouetting and singing, 
while the black-robed sisters and the priest 
in cassock chalked upon the cask the number 
of buckets emptied into it. 

The sun was setting, when we saw the long 
white line again moving across the fields to 
the town opposite with the cathedral-crowned 
fortress towering above it, and far away on 
either side toward neighboring villages. The 
light was fading when we started after them, 
and, stalking through the stubble, came the 
black line of the gipsy bands, one man in each 
carrying his bass viol over his shoulder like 
some strange mystic banner. They played 
in the hotel restaurant that evening when 
the town was gay with the gaiety of an 
abundant vintage. The gipsies were always 
showing us some new, undreamt-of side of 
their character, and I remember it was at 
Gyula Fehervar, where we had not spoken to 

them, that when J was drawing in our 

corner, and the second violin, taking up the 
collection, came and stopped in front of our 
table with the usual polite bow, such a furious 
protest came hissing across the room from the 
leader and all the others, that he thrust the 
plate quickly behind his back and fled. They 



232 TO GIPSYLAND 

did not know us ; but J was an artist ; 

they were artists too ; that was enough. 

Two days later we were in the midst of the 
vintage at Koloszvar, again wandering, and 
gossiping, and tasting wine in the sloping 
vineyards. We came into Koloszvar strangers, 
but we were greeted as friends in more than 
one wine-garden, and all the long, warm, 
sunny Sunday morning we spent with the 
professor and the parson, who had been 
among the first to bid us welcome, while 
the Czardas rang in our ears, the gulyas 
steamed on the table in front of us, and we 
looked to the town below glittering in the hot 
sunlight, to the windings of the Szamos, and 
to the near hazy mountains, over which we 
had journeyed from Torda, with those mar- 
velous peasants who look like the old Flor- 
entines Pinturicchio painted. 

With the same friends we dined in the 
evening, down in the town, and Pongratz 
was there with his band — Pongratz who is 
invited to the feasts of kings and emperors, 
who, now that old Racz Pal is dead, is the 
most famous gipsy leader in all Hungary. 
He did us the honor to come up to our table 
and "play into our ear," and in his music 



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TO GIPSYLAND 235 

there was that which sets one dreaming back 
one's old broken dreams. In the morning he 
honored us still further by a visit, when he 
brought with him his photograph and his 
daughter, the prettiest girl in Koloszvar. But 
the name of the real gipsy is never heard 
in the royal palace. It was not for a re- 
nowned Pongratz that we had journeyed to 
Transylvania. 

As we rode out of the town in the hour 
before dawn on the day following, some 
young men, their silk hats on the back of 
their heads, were reeling home from the 
night's orgy, singing the last wild Czardas 
with which the gipsies had drugged their 
wine ; and the watchman, in long sheepskin, 
was making his rounds, his halberd striking 
the ground at every step. This was the last 
we saw of Koloszvar, but the entire character 
of that eastern land, so strange to us, seemed 
typified in these men, whose dress belonged 
to the boulevards, but whose song, for all one 
knows, may have been first sung in the val- 
leys of the Altai or on the banks of the Volga, 
and in this watchman bearing the arms with 
which his ancestors under Hunyadi Janos 
once repulsed the Turks, through streets 



236 TO GIPSYLAND 

lined with the houses of nineteenth-century 
civilization. 

It had turned bitterly cold in the night. In 
the dawn we saw snow on all the near moun- 
tains. Winter had come, and this year, at 
least, we could wander no more on the roads. 
Not far from Koloszvar we took the train 
for Budapest. 



We had not found the real gipsy, unless, 
indeed, we should have known him in the old 
man fiddling for himself in the broad Burzen- 
land, as we rode into the mountains of 
Fogaras. He it was, perhaps, for whom we 
had made the long journey over the water 
and across Europe ; and yet, though the 
peasants had understood him as they passed, 
we were at heart such Philistines that we had 
not recognized him until too late. He was 
the only gipsy left in Transylvania, where 
the Romanies no longer travel apre drom, 
but are being fast elevated into farmers and 
laborers, fast degraded into serfs ; where the 
musicians send their children to school and 
talk of their mission and their profession. Our 



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TO GIPSYLAND 



239 



gipsy has vanished from Hungary forever. 
If we could but believe it, almost always is 




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: 



THE REALITY OF OUR DREAMS. 



that best which nearest lieth. It had been at 
home that our ideal had been most nearly 
realized. Davy Wharton at the Camden 



240 TO GIPSYLAND 

reservoir, Rudi in the Mannerchor Garden, 
Mattie Cooper at Hampton Wick, and not 
Pongratz of Koloszvar, Goghi of Bestercze, 
Racz Pal of Budapest, were the tacho Romany 
chals. But to learn this we have wandered so 
long and so far, we have seen men every- 
where working so hard, that sometimes we 
wonder if we ourselves are not the only hu- 
man beings now who are 

Free as the deer in the forest, 
As the fish where the river flows, 
Free as the bird in the air ! 



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